Jacken’s Blog

Some thoughts about Apples decision to move Macs over to Intel processors.

Will Apple continue to make machines with low specs? Every time Apple releases machines, there’s always specifications that annoys me. It’s always a bit slower RAM chips, slow bus speed (on laptops), older cheaper versions of graphics cards and so forth. Will the switch to Intel make this a thing of the past? The video card manufacturers will probably still need to write drivers specifically for Mac OS X, but at least they should be able to use some of their knowhow of Intel processors to optimize better than today. Hopefully they wont take twice the price for cards, just because of the driver.

Will Intel macs run Windows? Phil Schiller have made some remarks that Apple will not support running Windows on a Mac, but that it probably would work. If this is true, that would be a great selling-point for switchers buying a Mac. If you buy a Mac you can run Mac OS X, linux AND Windows. This will only work with computers from Apple. There will be emulators that would be able to run natively on Intel processors, giving the user a fast Windows machine under Mac OS X. And my guess is that hackers will get OS X up and running on standard PCs within a couple of weeks, if not faster.

Ability to upgrade your Intel Mac with faster processors? My guess is that Apple will make this hard to do. But I would love to be able to change to a faster processor, just like I can do with a PC. So please Apple, no soldering the CPU directly to the motherboard.

Clones? Sooner or later Apple will start to license Mac OS X to other manufacturers. And that’s the day Bill Gates will start coughing up blood. Probably later than sooner…