Solipsism Gradient

It’s been a memorable, tiring, interesting, productive week. My stay at The Mosser Hotel has been enjoyable; the service is excellent, the rooms are OK though a little cramped, and the location can’t be beat. Only a block from Moscone and even nearer to Market Street and the SFO Apple Store. Many thanks also to the Hyperjeff, my courteous and forgiving roommate.

I’m now back at the South Airport Travelodge, spent the morning day getting packed and lugging my brand new iMac G5 around; a heavy beast, but worth it! And in the afternoon visited my old haunts at Berkeley. So now that that’s done, I’ll have the Sunday to rest up, organize my writings, and get set for the trip back to Brazil around Monday noon. More anon.

The dust is slowly settling, Apple stock is behaving normally, and everybody and their dog have emitted opinions about the MacIntel story. So who may win, and who may lose in the next 12 months?

Winners:

• Apple, of course. As I commented below, they’re free (or will be, in a year) of the CPU-architecture-as-a-religion meme. They get a literally cool CPU/chipset for their PowerBooks; although I suppose they won’t use that name in the future; how about IBook ? They get dual-core CPUs right now, and a 64-bit version in the future. Even the stock analysts are liking this, though for mostly the wrong reasons. Also, switching processors did establish a precedent for Apple: Intel knows they’re not captive clients, and they’ll have to treat Steve Jobs with kid gloves lest he switches away again. Finally, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will come out simultaneously, or even some weeks before, Longhorn, and with smaller minimum requirements. The new low-end Intel Macs may even take a goodly part of the low-end market away from Microsoft.
• Intel. They were certainly getting tired of being perceived as just the evil tail end of the evil Wintel dragon. Intel’s not very pleased with Microsoft these days and they were being pressed on other fronts. Getting Apple’s business is a glamorous endorsement which has far more weight than Apple’s smaller marketshare leads outsiders to believe. They’ll certainly be pleased to have a partner which actually will insist on getting the latest and greatest stuff, without being concerned about backwards compatibility issues like, say, legacy BIOS support. By the way, Intel will now be free to cut away, say, the 50% of the Pentium that still support all those legacy modes and compatibility instructions, and supply Apple with an optimized-for-Mac OS X chip. With all the silicon saved, they could double the number of cores, put in more cache, support Altivec instructions or whatever they fancy; after all, it won’t really have to boot Windows anyway, right? Finally, Intel’s attempts to produce new PC designs were, let’s be charitable, not much good. They now have the best design team in the industry to showcase their new technology.
• Developers. At least the Cocoa developers, the Open Source developers, and the Carbon developers that already were using Xcode. For most vanilla apps, it’s just a recompile and some tweaking. The added discipline will be good for people, and the market will grow a lot. This is a great time to be a Cocoa developer, and I for one intend to take advantage of it.
• Stockholders. Both Apple and Intel stock will benefit from the new synergy between the two companies. I’m an Apple stockholder, and I’ll be looking at Intel stock very carefully soon.
• Gamers. Let’s face it, most full-screen games usually push aside the underlying OS when they come in, have their own user interface, talk directly to the graphics card and deign to let the OS do something only for mundane stuff like saving scores files. So many developers didn’t even bother to port to the Mac. When Virtual PC or a similar product comes out, gamers will have access to all Windows games at full speed; and it’s almost certain that the Intel Macs will have some virtualization facility built in, but won’t dual-boot. As long as Mac OS X will be whatever the new machines boot into, Apple will certainly allow other OSes to run under its control; that way, the user will always have the Mac OS X GUI visible somewhere. The effect of this on game developers is debatable. Some will be relieved not to have to do dual versions anymore. Mac-only developers will lose the Altivec advantage, so this may have some impact.

Losers:

• Metrowerks. CodeWarrior has, unfortunately, been going downhill since they were acquired by Motorola, and is now officially dead. Apparently their Intel compilers have been bought by Nokia, a move so outside my field of expertise that I’m not going to comment further on it, but they’re out of the picture now. Apparently they’re concentrating on the embedded market now, where they may still do well.
• Microsoft. Or at least partially. Windows is the new Classic; Windows apps will run in a “Red Box” and will look quaint and old-fashioned. As I said above, Leopard may well eat into Microsoft’s low-end marketshare. And the Wintel meme is dead; people now know that there are alternatives to Microsoft, and are actively looking for them. Defecting to the Mac will now appear easier and more natural for non-techies. Yes, Microsoft will keep a finger in the pie; their sales of Office won’t go down, as any Windows sale lost will be compensated by a Mac sale, and they’ll certainly be selling much more copies of Virtual PC, if they can bring the cost down. Still, this is a philosophical defeat for Microsoft in several aspects.
• Adobe et al. Adobe are publicly committed to port their stuff to Xcode and Intel. From what I heard from inside sources, the Xcode transition will take several times as much effort and time as the Intel transition per se. Adobe and other companies with huge codebases that used CodeWarrior have their own software workflow and converting this may take up much, maybe all, of the next 12 months. What this will do to the apps they bought from MacroMedia is anyone’s guess; I’ll say that some of them may not survive. From past experiences the move may be altogether too much for Quark, who’ve taken years to do a not-so-good Carbon port.
• AMD. The consensus seems to be that AMD, even though they might seem at first glance a better fit to Apple than Intel, apparently didn’t have the necessary product line depth to fit the new Apple. Still, nothing says they couldn’t supply chips for future high-end Apple products.
• AV developers. Apple’s Pro AV products already had the market pretty well sewn up, and now they’ll be running well-optimized on the new Macs from day one. Competitors will be at least a year behind; not an enviable position.
• Cluster users. The whole G5/Altivec hype was really justified for these guys; Xserve clusters have been building a well-deserved reputation for very high-end scientific computing. I don’t see a comparable Intel-based machine coming out from Apple before 2007. The same applies to 64-bit computing. Steve Jobs hinted that new PowerPC machines are still in the pipeline, so this may be moot, but the folks I’ve talked to here are quite nervous.

Nivardo Cavalcante wrote:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html

Intel buying Apple? Not very likely in my opinion, unless they ask Steve Jobs to become CEO of Intel too… even more unlikely is the other acquisition rumor I read, of Apple buying FreeScale. No, a collaboration makes more sense for both companies.

Ibis Itiberê S Luzia wrote:

So what about CELL? Did you hear something related in WWDC?

Nothing… too soon, I think.

I don’t want really to conduct a long discussion here, but…

Ibis Itiberê S Luzia wrote:

“The soul of the Mac is the CPU”. What is the meanning of the therm “Mac”? If I’m not wrong a “Mac” is a computer and not a software. The software is called “Operational System” which in this case can be System 7,8,9 or X. And at least what differentiated a Mac from an ordinary PC? Was the CPU, wasn’t? We were able to get experiences that ordinary PC users didn’t accomplished. We were able to run programs that they could’nt. The great difference was that Apple had a CPU that it helped to develop together with IBM and Motorola. They had the “difference” and this maked Apple so different.

I think that may have been more applicable in the past. In 1984 I bought my first Mac. The Macintosh was the user experience, the Mac operating system, the 68K CPU, the SCSI interface, the NuBus boards, the ADB Keyboard and mouse, the 3.5″ floppies. All these components enabled something extra in the user experience.

This is quantum physics in that it really needs someone operating the computer to have the “experience”. All of the components I’ve listed above have been changed: the operating system is now Unix and NeXT based, the CPU migrated to the PowerPC, SCSI, NuBus, ADB and floppies were replaced by new technologies. But people agree, when they sit down at an iMac G5, that it’s still a Mac – although a completely different Mac from the 1984 Mac 128K.

So, I’m actually writing this at an Intel Mac. It’s still a Mac. Everybody here at WWDC agrees with me, as far as I can tell. The user experience has evolved, but the essence has remained. It’s faster for some things, it’s slower for other things. This is irrelevant; it’s a different model, that’s all. It uses other chips inside. That’s irrelevant too.

Let’s move on. There’s tons of new stuff to do and write about.

Posted by Ibis Itiberê S Luzia:
Reiner:

God knows the respect I have for your words but I can’t be convinced that Apple done what was right thing to do.

People make great confusions all the time. Who said “Think different”? Was I? No. Was Apple and Steve Jobs. Who said: “Switch”. Was I? No. Was Apple and Steve Jobs. Who said “Gigahertz is a myth”. Was I? No. Now they are “thinking evenly” , switching and accepting the fact that “gigahertz was the matter”. They lied? I think so. They lied and betrayed. Why think different if Apple says one thing and do other completely different? “Do what I say you to do not what I do” And if I’m not wrong “Think different” is not a single ad campaign but Apple’s Company main rule ! They’re stepping over the companie’s main theme and still asking us to accept that !? A processor is much more than a “graphics board” or a “mouse” or an “ethernet board”. A processor is the computer brain. And a change in a processor takes “years” to be accomplished contrary to other components that can be changed and “voila” you have your computer running the same way as you correctly stated below.

“The soul of the Mac is the CPU”. What is the meanning of the therm “Mac”? If I’m not wrong a “Mac” is a computer and not a software. The software is called “Operational System” which in this case can be System 7,8,9 or X. And at least what differentiated a Mac from an ordinary PC? Was the CPU, wasn’t? We were able to get experiences that ordinary PC users didn’t accomplished. We were able to run programs that they could’nt. The great difference was that Apple had a CPU that it helped to develop together with IBM and Motorola. They had the “difference” and this maked Apple so different. Now Apple is an ordinary PC (luxury PCs actually) like any other brand. With few modifications we will be able to run Mac OS X on a grey PC maden in Taiwan or Hong Kong like Windows and Linux. Is this “thinking different”? What makes Apple different now? Mac OS X is a Unix, like Linux. It’s not so different. We are only “one else” now, we are PC users, not Mac users anymore. Thanks Steve.

Yesterday I spent some time at one of the prototype Macs with a Pentium inside. There was one of them with the cover removed. The most remarkable thing was – and, now that photos have leaked, I don’t think I violate any NDA by saying this – that there was nothing remarkable about the box (a standard cheese-grater PowerMac) or about the motherboard (a standard Intel motherboard). There was nothing remarkable about it usage-wise either; unless you looked at the “About This Mac” window, or at the System Profiler Report, or at the Processor preference panel, there was no way of telling what CPU was inside. It ran some unreleased build of Tiger, and there was this huge conspicuous security cable on it for some reason .

But it walked like a Mac, it quacked like a Mac, it was a Mac to all intents and purposes. I downloaded a dozen of random software packages off the Internet, they all just worked – under the Rosetta translator, which I had to see working to really believe in. The perceptual speed was, perhaps, a little faster than my 1GHz PowerBook; quite usable. I suppose this will get faster after a year of tweaking; another word in everybody’s mouth these past days.

Ah, and a bit of news which also leaked out today: Steve Job’s machine was not a souped-up quad processor monster, just the same box I had been using, but with some extra RAM. So, Rosetta is one cool app. I talked to one of the guys on the Rosetta team and he confirmed what I saw happening at the keynote: when you launch an app the second time, it uses the cached translated binary, so it launches much faster.

I looked at the installed libraries, drivers and applications: of course they were all “fat” binaries. The entire system is fat. Oops, sorry, “universal binary” is the politically correct version now. It’s not quite double the size of the standard Tiger installation, but who cares in these days of 100+GB disk drives?

I checked out some of my own projects on the new Xcode 2.1. Nearly all standard Cocoa stuff just compiled and ran with no modifications, no matter what combination of architectures I compiled it for. You can even step-debug PowerPC binaries on this thing, they somehow made gdb Rosetta-aware, so that the translated executable is back-linked to your PowerPC source code; very cool. This is probably a bonus of the Mach-O executable format, like the universal binary format itself. The old Carbon CFM format will run under Rosetta, but not natively; CFM is the new Classic, it seems. The old Classic appears to be dead at last; I suppose getting the Classic compatibility layer running under Rosetta would be a huge pain.

I don’t have any straight Carbon projects to test. I do have one new project that twiddles bytes that flow to and from the disk at a lot of places, because it uses a legacy format (one dating from 1984, by the way). I got most of it converted in less than an hour by scanning for certain source code patterns and putting byte swap function calls around the pertinent expressions. Now, the publicly available Guidelines list dozens of exceptions, where porting takes some extra work: if you use custom resource formats or Apple Events, if you use bitfields, if you want to divide by zero, and so forth. I think the biggest headache will be for whoever has invested time in writing great gobs of code in PowerPC assembly or Altivec; fortunately I never did this myself.

One place where I later lost another hour of work was in a somewhat obscure open source module which made unwarranted assumptions about the order local variables were allocated on the stack. Now, this is something which certainly works for one-off applications, but to actually publish such a thing without calling attention to it, is somewhat foolhardy. This is where many of the conversion failures will come from, I believe; sloppy coding and unwarranted assumptions.

Ibis Itiberê S Luzia wrote:

What about the “megahertz” myth? What about the “switcher” campaign? Now Apple switched. Apple computer no longer exists: now it could well be labeled “Apple Software”. Would anyone point out a reason to buy a Mac (Not “Mac’ anymore, now they are only Apple’s PCs) instead of a chinese PC now?

This is a common misconception. I’m typing this on a Mac at WWDC. There’s a Pentium inside, but you can’t tell unless you go to the “About This Mac” window. It’s a Mac in all other respects. Mac OS X won’t ever run on a chinese PC.

If I were a hardware developer for the Apple platform or if I were a software developer I would be seriously anger with Jobs decision now. He has no idea about the commitment that people which uses the Macintosh has with its products.

I am a software developer and an Apple stockholder. I think Steve Jobs did a very good thing, namely, remove the Mac’s sometimes irrational identification with CPU architecture. While you may disagree with details of the timing or of the way the transition will be made, you’ll have to agree that Apple has suffered too much at the hands of Motorola and IBM in the past. Apple now has the chance to be independent of processor architecture, more than any other computer company can be. And that was the point of my post.

If Intel won’t do the right thing in the future, once the transition to universal binaries is complete, Apple can just drop them at a moment’s notice and jump to some new architecture. After all, that’s what they do now with everything else: video cards, networking chips, and so forth. And you, as a user, usually won’t know and won’t care.

It’s possible if now we think Apple is only a software house which still sells computers for heritage reasons. If Apple hiden from everyone for all of this time that they had an x86 version of their system why not think they have plans or possibly still alfa versions of their systems for almost all CPUs in the market? Thinking in that direction it’s very plausible to conclude that will be possible to run Mac OS X in almost every machine in the near future. What about the CELL? If it goes as good as it was predicted by IBM and Sony for sure Apple will be on that.

Exactly. Where I think you’re wrong is that Apple will never sell Mac OS X separately. The whole Mac experience is possible only on Apple-built machines. I have owned two Mac clones in the 90’s, and while they were good machines, they weren’t true Macs. Apple as a software developer makes no sense.

Can Apple fight piracy? For sure no. They can’t. And Apple will lost profits for piracy as it will became each time easyer to piracy and “hack” DRMs and Mac OS X license codes. They can even “dongle” the Mac OS X, it will make no difference.

Computer architecture is not only CPU architecture. A system comprises controller chips and peripherals. You are assuming that Apple will just slap an Intel motherboard into one of their cases; that certainly won’t happen. Even if the CPU itself is a completely standard Pentium, just to get it to boot lots of things have to happen first: the memory controller has to be configured, the RAM must be checked, a list of peripherals must be built, and so on. All these details are different from one Mac model to the next – often wildly different. Every Mac model has its own “firmware” for doing this. That won’t change.

These things are handled on PCs by the BIOS. But there’s no reason for Apple to build a machine with a standard PC BIOS, or with a standard PC controller chip! These things are needed only for booting Windows; something Apple has no interest in having happen on a Mac. No doubt someone will go to great lengths to have Mac OS X boot on some random PC motherboard. It will be a neat exercise in futility. OK, it may even boot, but then you’ll be restricted to peripherals for which Apple (or the manufacturer) has written device drivers; plug in your chinese Ethernet card and it won’t be recognized.

So, rest assured, we’ll see a variety of Mac models in the future. Some may even still use PowerPCs. Many will certainly use Pentiums. I still think the G5 is a great chip, much better than the Pentium. But I don’t do assembly programming anymore. Only rabid game geeks get excited about which video card does certain operations better than another. As long as it runs my Mac programs well, and looks like a Mac, and feels like a Mac, and has the Apple logo about it, why should I feel betrayed when Apple changes whoever makes its power plug? Its controller chip? Its CPU? Were you sad when Apple made no more 68K machines?

No, it’s not goodbye “PowerPC Inside forever”, welcome “Intel Inside forever”. It’s “Anything Inside”. Whatever works.