Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sun 5th Jun 2005 22:11 UTC
After News.com's Friday report that Apple is moving to Intel/x86, the respected publication Wall Street Journal and now NYTimes threw their reputation behind the rumor. Many people still remain skeptical, but I personally believe that the time is right for Apple to switch to x86-64, for two main reasons:
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... even though the article is slightly incorrect.
(1) Drivers. The linux kernel was written to allow the average computer science student to make up quickly a new driver as needed. More than half of the hardware djungle pieces are supported today. That even helps Mac OS X given its BSD-ish kernel as many of the driver stacks are very similar across unix kernels. Apple may easily provide a wealth of new hardware that its current customers could never enjoy before. It will not be there suddenly but the darwin kernel is open and ready to be a target for that computer science student to port some drivers from linux or the other BSDs.
(2) Desktop. The gain of linux on the desktop market is not so much for longhorn being late. It is about all those viruses. The effort to make a windows PC ready for the rough internet world is very high, compared to a one-step installation of a linux distro. Many win32 users skip that and allow consiously their machines to be filled with trojans.
(3) Industry. The gaming industry as well as the backyard far-east hardware manufacturer were not targeting linux because... it is a kind of moving target. The kernel and base libraries are changing quickly. For example database vendors only support few big distros but not linux as a general term. Apple will be in the game nicely.
(4) Software. The common linux distro ships with thousands of free little helper programs from the opensoure domain. Making them ready for win32 was always a hard thing but for Mac OS X it will be easy. One day per program. Latest releases of Mac OS X even included X11 support, AFAIR.
I guess that darwin/Mac will provide a big opportunity. Linux users will find a unixish environment that they can safely recommend to their computer-phobic relatives. It has fine stuff for the desktop for sure. I do not know whether it can draw the win32 power gamer but (a) that is largely a choice of the game makers and (b) catching some part of the x86 unix market is a good share in the pocket as well.
Remember that Apple does already build (unix) network servers...