Apple’s return to the throne or final headshoot?
Well, it seams it’s official - Apple is turning his back to IBM and the whole PowerPC platform and moving their Macs to Intel.
This is the day we Mac lovers will never forget. It seams that Mac (as a platform) will no longer be considered as an “alternative” or “exotic” because it will be using x86-based platform. The only selling point, although big, they’ll have from now on is their “superior” MacOS X. Which is great to use, but suffers somehow from the ideology point of view. After this announcement Apple lost it’s magic appeal that it had as an alternative to other “standard PC clones”. For me, it was an escape from boring PC-world to exciting Mac, where everything is nicely designed from the PowerPC core out. But now this “nice visual design” thing doesn’t look so exciting any more.
So what is left for us, the alternative freaks? Well, Sony announced their PlayStation 3 some time ago, that will feature IBM PPC and Cell processors. This seams to be a nice starting point for my next workstation. As for my next notebook… I hope Apple will renovate the whole PowerBook line so it will really run 2-3 times faster. If not, my next hope lies in IBM’s hands to produce next PowerPC notebook that will be a good alternative to PBs.
As for software part… I thing this is a perfect opportunity to bright up and get those perspective linux-based “pro applications” (Ardour, Cinelerra, Blender) to the point where everything works the user expects to (for example, Cinelerra’s GUI is catastrophic). The only way we (as in Linux community) can stand-up to the Mac conquering x86 is to offer “non-bloated, non-confusing, just-working, sleek-GUI, fast Pro-tools”. And this is where we should start kicking to all directions. Well, there is another problem - distributions, that don’t work. But that’s another story I’ll leave for another time…
June 15th, 2005 at 15:11
IBM won’t do nothing. He has sold all his computer producing line to a Chinese company about 3 months ago. So there wont be any new IBM notebooks just some Chinese wonabe IBM.