gavinshearer.com

« "A Two Year Transition" | Main | Bird's Nose Is Broken .. Again! »

June 7, 2005

Why Buy PowerPC?

My friend Bill Hays and I traded e-mails today about all this MacTel business. As a pragmatic, skeptical older guy who doesn't buy in to all this gadget-of-the-moment hoo-ha, he had a few questions. Specifically:

First, when I said in my "Two Year Transition" post that:

"...it's a safe bet Apple will be building for the PowerPC until 2012, at least."

How does that jibe with Apple's official party line of:

"Apple® announced plans to deliver models of its Macintosh® computers using Intel® microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007."

His second question was, "I was also about to buy an iMac, probably the 2 GHz 17-inch version, but I'm wondering now if I should limp along with my current stable of aging Macs and wait for the new Mactel versions, out in a year if Apple can keep its promise."

My response to both is interrelated.

First, when I said Apple would be "building for" the PowerPC, I meant software, not hardware. Apple is clearly exiting the PowerPC hardware business. However, since the last PowerPC Mac is slated to ship in 2007, a conservative guess would say that Apple will ship PowerPC binaries for a good five years beyond that point. Hence, 2012.

Why will they continue to ship binaries? Indeed, as MacInTouch and others are pointing out, Apple put poor MacOS 9 out to pasture as quickly as possible. Why won't they try to ignore the PowerPC business in the same way?

There are three reasons for Apple to show the love to PowerPC customers.

1. Economics. There are a lot of us out here (indeed, we represent 100% of the user base), and it's just not conceivable that Apple will tell us to pound sand without reaping the whirlwind. Even OS 9 has taken a good five years to die from 2000/01 until now - except you can still use OS 9! Indeed, support for 9 is excellent under OS X. Apple didn't cut their own throat back then, and they're not going to do it now.
2. Ten Is Not The New Nine. OS 9 had substantial challenges. Chief among them was that it was, in effect, an architectural hack from 1983 that simply kept going, like some zombie from a George Romero film. There was no way to make 9 a modern operating system, so Steve decided to get busy replacing 9 instead of patching it. It's like that old car you love, but that needs $10,000 worth of body work to give it a new lease on life. And even if you spent the ten grand, you still wouldn't have a new car. Why not drive the old car until your custom-ordered Lexus is ready, and put the cash into something with a future?
   
   Conversely, PowerPC OS X is still OS X. It's just got a PowerPC processor under it.
3. Strategy. Apple's decision to move the developer community to XCode gives them the ability to not just offer Intel/PowerPC binaries of products, but to - conceivably - add other processors and configurations at some point in the future. Want SPARC? MIPS? Cell? Apple can add the checkboxes. If the code is written to the right specifications, multi-targeted binaries are possible. (It's interesting to note that this is a feature offered by NeXT in the early 1990s.) Apple, therefore, is morphing from a supplier of a tightly-coupled hardware and software system to a supplier of an operating system (and applications) that are platform-agnostic. I would be willing to bet that if Rosetta can do PowerPC on Intel, it can do a hell of a lot of other processors on other hardware.
   
   So if Apple might be birthing a bunch of different machines with a bunch of different processors in the future, why not continue to build for PowerPC? It's just a checkbox in XCode. And those "old" customers might be willing to drop an additional $130 on Max OS X 10.8 ("Tabby Cat"?) instead of buying new hardware.
   
   (Hardware, by the way, has a gross margin of ~28%. A copy of OS X has a margin three times that. They'll keep liking us.)

Taken together, this means that if you have your eye on a PowerPC Mac (Richard, for example, has been panting to use his soon-to-expire student discount on a dual-proc G5), buy the silly thing. It's certainly true that the new, Intel-based Mac customers are the ones who will be beta-testing all this stuff. My sense is that PowerPC customers are in for a smooth ride ... at least for seven more years.

Buy the iMac. But get the 20" - it's worth it.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at June 7, 2005 8:47 PM. Posted to Apple.

« "A Two Year Transition" | Main | Bird's Nose Is Broken .. Again! »