Five Four years ago today, OSNews published some interesting articles. Apple announced it was dropping PPC for x86 (that one was a bombshell). That news was met with fear, excitement, and a fair bit of skepticism. Five Four years later, that decision has gone down as one of the smartest, gutsiest moves in computing business history. Congratulations to Apple’s engineers for making it go so smoothly. We also examined whether “soon” personal computers will have the ability to respond to stimuli from the outside world, by seeing and interpreting video or other signals. We’re still waiting on that one. (And the project we linked to is now a dead link). Note: due to a back-end Snafu, this one didn’t post until the fifth, but it’s still an interesting date in OSNews history, so enjoy.We linked to a review of Mac OS X “Tiger.” Developers of KDE browser Konqueror announced it had passed the ACID2 test. It had included patches from work Apple had done on Safari, which had been out for more than a year in June 2004.
Finally, gaming icon, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto spoke with CNN and discussed why innovation is dying in the video game industry. He spoke about Nintendo’s upcoming console, then-codenamed “revolution.” What we now know as the Wii really ended up being a revolution, and threw Nintendo’s console rivals for a loop. Going back and reading that article is like watching a movie about the D-day invasion. Nintendo, and everyone else must have been thinking that their “revolution” was a long shot at best, but looking back from 2009, its success almost seems inevitable. I tend to agree with Shigeru Miyamoto that innovation was dying in 2004, but I think the players of all console games can be happy that the Wii gave the game industry a jolt of adrenaline and kicked them back toward gameplay and fun, instead of just an FPS war.
And an added bonus: read the OSNews comments on the Apple x86 and Nintendo stories to see opinions that are alternatingly clueless and visionary in retrospect. Do you recognize your opinions in there? How have they changed?
The best part of this is reading the comments on that thread. Here are some highlights:
And props to Eugenia for this bit of foresight:
Not 100% dead on, but very very close.
I think it’s understandable why people reacted the way they reacted. After all, Apple itself had to eat its own words, too. They more or less successfully camouflaged it by trying to spin it into a positive light marketing wise by showing some pretty graphs. But they definitely did a 180 degree turnaround.
P.S why am i unable to see more than a handful of comments when there are 336?
That’s when I really started to detest Apple. I’d been a Mac advocate for a while, and I fully bought the whole, “the RISC PPC is really much faster, in terms of operations dispatched, despite it’s lower clock-speed.” When they switched to x86, the message was, “look how much faster these x86 chips are! THEIR CLOCK SPEEDS ARE SO MUCH HIGHER!” They switched messages without missing a beat. Their blatant display of self-righteous, unashamed self-contradiction and hypocrisy lost them one hard-core Mac advocate.
This was exactly my point, but you stated it much more clearly than I.
I bought into the PPC being faster argument too, and maybe it was true at some point. But when the PPC speeds started to stall, and IBM was unable/unwilling to deliver the G5 in a laptop package, moving to x86 made great sense. I just didn’t like the spooky switch in messages, and everyone’s complacency about it.
they didn’t. the message was “intel chips are more power efficient”, which was true as apple didn’t switch to the p4 but to the core architecture. the clock speed of the last imac g5 was a bit higher than that of the first intel imac.
Select Flat view/per page ALL. It was from before the forums were threaded – nested view doesn’t work right.
What I recall from the whole switchover was Jobs’ adamant denial a few weeks beforehand that Apple would never, ever, not in million years support the x86 platform. I think the news had been broken on the Apple secrets site that was shut down a couple of years ago. I can only speculate as to his reasons for the denial (contract negotiations I suppose), but the way it came off after Apple made it public was that he was just lying outright. And this about face didn’t gather as much attention as I’d hoped.
…Apple announced the switch in 2005.
You are so right… It was WWDC 2005… Therefore, it means that someone did an epic failure!
I remember I was shocked when I heard about this. But as soon as it was announced I realized it was actually a brilliant.
My instant reaction was “NOOO!” then it was “waaaait a minute, you mean I can now run any OS supported by X86?, wicked!”
After I got my first Intel based Mac, I had multiple instances of Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and Mac OS. All of sudden you wonder ” why the heck didn’t they do this sooner”
By switching to intel Apple instantly removed a barrier to adoption that stood in the way of the old architecture. Namely, you can run whatever OS you want on your mac now. THAT i believe made a huge difference to allot of buyers.
It was definitely a great move for Apple.
When anyone inquires as to which platform I think is better now, I tell them, with a bit of a wicked grin, that a Mac is a PC.
It’s certainly brought down the barriers to adoption in the organization where I work. I’m glad the Mac people get to use their preferred platform, and if necessary, we can just use Windows only on the computer. Now if only vendors would offer dual-licensing agreements, or support OSX at all. I’m looking you Adobe and AutoDesk.
Holey. Does anyone else think that it’s unbelievable that this was 5 years ago!
Edited 2009-06-05 20:10 UTC
Try 4 years ago today. All the articles are from 2005.
Apart from the PPC>x86 switch, David points out another article concerning “responsive computers” and asks the question at what point it is today.
To take one example, eye movement registering has made great advancements but still requires a dimly lit room and very specific (i.e., individualised) calibration to measure eye movement, gaze and other such factors well. The equipment is quite expensive still.
Three-dimensional haptic tools (that is, not tablets or force feedback) still are “scientists’ toys” and only extend to some specific tasks at the time. Exceptions to this, naturally, are the multi-million dollar research projects.
Nevertheless, we did see an impressive increase in the use of touch screens; from navigation to printing, from smartphones to image browsing. For now, embedded systems are the way to go. It seems over the past few years we have become realistic in the daily usage of such systems. We don’t want our fridge to tell us to get more milk, we do want our car to tell us how to get to the supermarket in order to get the milk. It seems we’ll be following this path for the years to come. But just maybe, in a few years, my computer will say “Welcome home!” and wag its tail.
…why Apple moved their Xserve away from Power. The Power6+ is the fastest CPU on the planet, x86-servers trail waaaay behind.
Sure, you wouldn’t want a Power6+ burning a hole in your desk and there is not even a hint of getting it in a “portable” version so I can see the desktop side of things moving x86 as smart.
Apple doesn’t like supporting more than one type of processor at a time? I don’t think they sell that many Xserves, so they wouldn’t get any sweet discounts from IBM even if they did switch to POWER. Apple’s marketing department would have to make OS X Server a must-have in the enterprise before it’d make sense.
Next supported 4 architectures and Apple currently supports 3 (when you include the iPhone/iPod Touch).
But I guess you’re right, I don’t think Xserves are that big a size of Apples sales.