On Monday 06 June 2005 10:11 pm, Adam Bower wrote:
Aye, I can't see many people buying expensive (or even a cheap mac-mini) power macs between now and next year. If I was about to buy a Mac I would seriously be considering buying a cheap PC instead.
Well that is exactly the boat I am in. Was at the point of buying either a Mini or a bottom end iMac. Now I am going to wait and see how this pans out over the next few months...and then maybe wait until the new arch is available.
I mean it's all very well them saying that they have some fancy technology that will code morph the PPC code to run pretty well on x86. But when you end up sitting on a PPC Mac (and all new ones are x86) are they going to supply the technology to do this the other way round, or are application developers going to give us PPC versions of their latest stuff for years to come.
How long will they release OSX versions for PPC once x86 is out ? Also don't Intel's 64bit offerings suck a bit compared to AMD64 (I thought that was the case) It's a shame really, we haven't even seen what a G5 can do with a full 64bit version of OSX yet (although I suspect that on general applications it makes little difference)
On the plus side ( I need cheering up because on the whole I am sceptical about this )
A machine running OSX on x86 would have about the bigest selection of software. A OSX wine port for Windows apps, and a lot of Linux/Unix applications are already ported (or easy to port) plus the PPC and x86 OSX software catalogue.
A lot of potential switchers (Windows to Linux) will suddenly have another option without the previous barrier of buying new hardware.
Depends on if Apple actually release OSX for x86 or just for Apple branded x86
Well I am betting that this will be on Apple kit only, but they have shocked me once so we will have to see.