Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 24th Jun 2003 15:32 UTC
I was present at Apple's WWDC yesterday and witnessed one of the historical moments in Apple's history, the introduction of their 64-bit platform. Am I impressed? The answer is complicated. I was happy to see Apple moving on and deliver. But I would have expected nothing less from a 4 billion tech company who had the need to catch up with the "other" platform, the 32-bit PC. You all heard by now what's new in yesterday's press releases and news coverings. But here is a wrap up of the first day of the conference and a commentary on what Apple really announced yesterday, underneath its surrounding distortion field.
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I would say that Apple did innovate with Panther. They pretty much always innovate, but on the cultural level. I mean really, who the hell uses that 3Ddesk manager thingie today? I know beos is big on osnews, but that's pretty much the only place where it is/was big. Apple merrit is that is does cultural innovation. An online music store isn't new. But Apple music store is the only one that actually makes an impact. Apple is a gateway from the technological interesting tidbits to something that is actually used by people.
I have no idea why you think rendez-vous is a big technological innovation. It's a cultural one. There are other, older network setups that allowed service discovery and so on. They just didn't have the impact like rendez-vous has. Sherlock 3? Forgotten Watson already? The point of sherlock 3 is that people are actually using it. I'm pretty sure that somewhere some obscure system used hardware accelerated graphics constantly.
Apples innovation lies in the fact that they are able to make obscure barely used technological features into mainstream functionality. Functionality that people are able to use (not way too complex), and actually use.
Btw, why are people constantly saying that GCC produces better code for ppc than for intel? It's not. In fact, the reverse is true. There are alot more and bigger companies that have invested time and money to optimise gcc for intel, than for ppc.
I think it's pretty fair to use the same compiler, and a similar system (unix) to do spec tests. Yeah, they could have used commercial compilers on intel, they also could have used commercial compilers for the G5.
Actual usefull and objective tests lie in the real application benchmarks (photoshop, mathematica, quake3,..). They will show you the importance of the entire system design (memory buses)