Empire Here We Come

After Apple schooled its users that Intel's chips are slower than IBM's, Apple today announced that Intel's processors will drive Macs starting in 2006. But an AP story, which is now legion on Web sites that should be doing a better job, like Silicon Valley.com, relies on a single opinion to damn the decision. Nathan Brookwood concludes, somehow, that the switch in processors will reduce Apple's market share.

Apple, meanwhile, told its developers today how easy it will be to modify their programs for the new architecture. HP has said the same thing about shifting to Itanium. It's always easy, according to the vendor who's mandating the change.

The AP story uses the typical journalist's trick of saying "analysts" when they mean only one. As if there were others who agreed with Brookwood, but couldn't provide a better quote. Brookwood says "each time there's an an architecture shift, many of its customers and partners say enough is enough."

That reflects a little bias, I'd say. Or if true, then HP's in some deep trouble, too, considering the breadth of architecture shift it prompts in moving to another of Intel's products. "Enough is enough" suggests the customer is already in distress.

I guess it's just too wild to imagine that Intel chips in Macs might give some weary Windows users, growing anxious about viruses that bog down their computers, a way to run both OS X and Windows on a single, low-cost box. Apple said today it is resigned to people buying Apple's next-year boxes to run Windows. However, it proposes to keep MacOS from booting on anything other than an Apple-brand computer. (That ought to sound familiar to the HP 3000 customers out there.)

That Apple move begs the question, "Why do people buy hardware from Apple, when it's so different from PC makers like Dell?"

The difference hasn't switched for Apple users: OS X. Until we descend into the crowded and gritty streets of Windows, we can probably still enjoy a measure of security difficult to ensure while using Microsoft's OS. I still believe that any moat that separates me from the PC world's insecurities, be it processor or OS, is welcome. Spyware, the worst of the lot, simply isn't a factor on a Mac. Yet.

It's far too early to determine the impact on Apple's market share from this manufacturing change, one that should not force changes to the thing that keeps Macs more secure. Any Mac downtick, of course, will be immediately attributed to this announcement by analysts who look for people saying "enough is enough." Some can't get enough. For Mac users this might spark a run on the G5 models. Out on macintouch.com today it said "Get PowerPC Macs while you still can!" from Amazon.com.

Nearly every report of the AP-grade seems to confuse the Mac's CPU with its OS while discussing differences. Unless the spyware writers can make time to code for both the Nextstep-based Mac OS as well as Windows, today's switch may be a change on a par with dropping the Motorola 68000 line 10 years ago.

Typical of the misunderstanding from the AP: Apple had a higher market share in the mid-80s, before it left the Moto chips behind. Aside from being ancient history in computing timelines, this wisdom overlooks the fact that during the 80s Macs had a bigger share because Windows was first non-existent, and then too green to be of much serious use. It was the DOS prompt vs. the Mac interface.

From my viewpoint, OS X didn't harm my Mac ownership. It simply delivered a great bounty of software to us Mac users. The old Macs didn't ship with Apache or FTP, for example, or run things like perl.

That AP writer was in a hurry, called one analyst, and wrote a lead with sizzle on a story that was supposed to be a less-sexy recount about the history of Apple's IBM relations. Some attention to the true nature of "Think Different" would have been more enlightening.

To learn more in three minutes, check out the NPR report of this evening. At least that reporter understands the difference between the OS and the CPU:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4682760