Intel Inside Your Mac?

Sometimes outlandish claims are too good to ignore. Jim Morrison might be farming in Oregon waiting to a make a comeback, Gigantopithecus may be roaming northern California waiting for Kobe to demand a new center (word is that Gigantopithecus can ball), the Coriolis Effect explains why your toilet water rotates when flushed and Apple is going to switch to Intel chips. Most of the time most of the the people would chalk all these rumors up to fanciful thinking but every so often some small scrap of evidence emerges that suddenly provides seeming legitimacy to the outlandish tales. Today’s bit-o-doggerel making one rumor that would generally be regarded as drug induced prevarication concerns the last item of out list of fanciful ideas: The Wall Street Journal published an article saying Apple was in negotiations with Intel and would likely be jettisoning the PowerPC in favor of Intel chips. The rumor was quickly dismissed by Apple but a simple corporate denial has yet to stop free form speculation when a rumor is this far reaching.

Reasons for the Change:

If Apple’s going to make a change there has to be a logical reason the sane among us will aver. Which would be generally true but Steve Jobs is not known for always making the most rational of decisions. One might presume that IBM has offended Steve and, in a fit pique better reserved for two year olds suddenly deprived of Dora the Explorer, he decided to jettison IBM in an effort to teach the tech giant a solid lesson. That, honestly, would make a great story. In reality that scenario is highly unlikely, while Steve Jobs may seem to run Apple as a his personal fiefdom he does answer to the board of directors and the shareholders and thus he would need a much better reason than “they ticked me off” to make such a change.

The counterpoint is that if Steve is upset for a legitimate reason then there could be something to the argument. It is no secret that the G5 iMac was delayed because the chip cupboard was bare and it is also widely known that Apple has had some serious problems getting their top end machines into the hands of consumers. Causing a manufacturer to miss ship dates and anger consumers is a great way to lose business and one could argue that Steve has finally had his fill of unexpected delays caused by IBM. As solid as that reasoning may seem at first glance it suffers from a lack of forward thinking. The Xbox 360 will feature a Power4 variant (the G5 is also a Power4 variant) so one would expect manufacturing ability to increase more rapidly in the future.

The second most commonly cited reason for the supposed switch is one of speed. Apple is supposedly upset with IBM for not catching up to Intel in the speed department. This argument seems particularly specious. The G5 is at least comparable to the best Intel chips currently available to consumers and in some ways much faster (though Intel is rolling out dual core chips very soon). There are various differences between the chips that make a straightforward comparison very tricky if not nearly impossible but suffice it to note that G5 chips feature plenty of power for high end uses. There are various other reasons given as to why Apple might choose Intel over IBM but few are as compelling as the ones mentioned (and rapidly discounted) as the reasons listed above.

Reasons for staying with IBM:

The first reason for staying the course, so to speak, is that the future is in RISC processors. Saying the future lies with RISC processing is nothing new, it is a lot like saying someday everyone will drive electric cars. Sure someday maybe everyone will drive electric cars but so far they are not catching on. Still there are signs that the future does indeed belong to RISC processors. One only has to look at the chips powering the Xbox 360 and the PS3 to see that RISC processing may finally be attaining the level of acceptance predicted for so long.

Even if the future will be dominated by RISC processors it doesn’t mean the near term will be. It is conceivable that Apple could adopt Intel chips for a short while to gain whatever advantage they think such chips might provide and make a move back to RISC processors when the time was right. Which brings us to the second reason not to switch: By changing horses at this point Apple’s marketing would be taking a huge perceived step backwards. For years people have heard about the superiority of Altivec enhanced chips, they’ve seen speed comparisons and been told just how great those chips are at every turn. All this adds up to make the chips found in Macs a crucial differentiation point between Macs and Windows based machines. If you cram a Pentium into Macs there will still be plenty of differences technically between the two machines but for the average user they’ll now see the Mac as only a competing OS and not a completely different machine. For some this might be appealing but the majority of Mac users will find “Intel Inside” heretical.

While the previous reasons are compelling the real switch killer is the applications. Apple supposedly has a copy of OS X running happily on X86 architecture somewhere in the bowels of their Cupertino campus but most software makers don’t have the luxury of OS X running on an Intel based machine. That means that, were Apple to switch, they will essentially be asking developers to do a fair bit work to their programs to get them to run on the new chips. Apple has been able to pull this off in the past by either offering chips with enough power to essentially negate any performance lost by running non native code (the switch from 680x0 chips to PowerPC) or by emulating the earlier operating system thus giving developers a long time to make the switch (moving from 9.2 to OS X). One might think that this tactic would work yet again but it is much easier to emulate x86 chips on Apple’s current chips than it is to emulate a G5 on, say, a Pentium 4. That would make the switch a very difficult trick to pull off indeed.

Maybe they just misunderstood:

You know that episode of Three’s Company where Jack overhears a snippet of a conversation between Janet and Chrissie and wildly misinterprets the meaning. Janet is talking astrology and says “I’m a cancer” and Jack thinks Janet has cancer and buys her a wig or some such twaddle? Many people are opining that this is precisely what is going with the latest rumor. On the surface this seems like the most probable of all the options. It could easily be that Apple is in talks with Intel about chips for something besides desktop computers. There may exist some secret new device coming our way or there might some component of the computer besides the CPU that Apple wants Intel to supply. Others opine it is nothing more than a way to ratchet the pressure up on IBM. If either version is true all the uproar is wasted emotion.

Read this and skip the rest:

Getting OS X to run on x86 hardware is no great leap but finding a decent reason for doing so is much more difficult. Short of IBM scheduling a meeting with Mr. Jobs and flat out telling him that with the new demands placed on the Fishkill plant by Microsoft and Sony they won’t be able to send them any chips that aren’t salsa-flavored and bagged in colorful wrappers one is hard pressed to think of any rational justification of making such a move. Still the rumor should be regarded with more than just derision, Apple has shocked the computing world before, one more time is not outside the realm of possibility. Still I’d wager we would see a two button Apple mouse with a scroll wheel before we ever see a Mac with an “Intel inside” sticker.