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January 12, 2006

Why I'm Not Buying A MacBook Pro

So MacWorld was on Tuesday, and His Steveness dropped the (much-rumored-in-advance) bomb: Intel Macs are now shipping.

This is, by most accounts, a good six months ahead of schedule. Last June, Steve stood up at WWDC and announced that the company would be shipping Intel machines "by this time next year." In the chronically-late-to-market computer industry, that's usually code for "by this time next year, we will have announced specific products that use Intel processors, which may or may not be available for sale at the moment we tell you about them."

So to get actual for-sale, get-'em-while-they're-hot Intel-based Macs (or "IBM" - funny, huh?) here in January is, well, remarkable.

So what'd we get? Well, we've got an iMac and a PowerBo- excuse me, a MacBook Pro (potentially the most artless name in the history of Apple Computer, and certainly one whose artlessness is competing with "Snakes on a Plane" in that department).

I've watched the keynote, of course, and, as you might imagine, the machines look damn good when they're up on stage, being bathed in the soft glow of the Reality Distortion Field. (Speed gains of 4 to 5x on the MacBook? Holy crap!)

And yet, despite my enthusiasm ... I'm not going to buy 'em.

Richard thinks I'm crazy (like, craaaaayyyyyy-zeeeeee) for taking this position (oh, if you're interested in his old 17" PowerBook - for a good price - contact me), but my thinking is pretty straightforward.

It goes like this. First, my current, one-year-old G4 PowerBook is a pretty damn good machine. So I don't need to buy anything. Buying now is all about want (which, when you think about it, is still enough to keep me in new iPods, but it's going to give pause when I'm thinking of dropping a few grand.)

Second, these new machines are brand new: Apple has never shipped a machine with Intel processors before. And, as one who has bought more than his share of Macs over the years, I'm here to tell you that the First Rule Of Fight Club is: you do not buy the first generation of Apple hardware. Ever. There's something in Apple's v1 product that isn't quite right, or seemed like a good idea in the lab. It'll be fixed in v2, guaranteed. In the meantime, save your money and let someone else get the kinks out.

Third, the speed gains on these new machines comes with an asterisk: thou shalt be running Intel-native applications in order to receive the increase. Yes, Tiger is now Intel-native, as is the iLife suite and a number of other day-to-day apps (BBEdit, for example). But the vast majority of apps (Photoshop, Office, Firefox, etc.) are still PowerPC binaries, which means that they'll be running under Rosetta for the forseeable future. This blunts the appeal of the machines a bit, because you have to pay a performance penalty for the emulation.

Fourth, these machines have a lot of unknowns. How long does the battery in the MacBook last? Can you install Windows on the drive and dual-boot between Mac OS X and XP (or, for that matter, Linux)? (The guys over at Unsanity have a long post about what's being lost in the MacBook.) And so on. Yes, some of this will be addressed when the reviews come out in MacWorld, but see Point #1, above, about buying v1 Apple hardware.

Fifth - and finally - I'm not buying because I suspect these machines aren't really that important. Oh, I don't mean "historically important" or anything - these computers will be known as The First Intel-based Macs forever more.

Instead, what I'm talking about is a bit more subtle.

When Steve announced the Intel transition, he talked a lot about "performance per watt" as the key performance metric of the Intel iron - that is, the Intel chips use less electricity to produce X amount of CPU power than the PowerPC does. Steve also talked about how this was going to allow Apple to "build the machines we want to build."

And then, when we take the wraps off, we get ... two current machines with Intel processors.

No, really. It's the same damn iMac that you could buy a week ago, but with an Intel chip. And the MacBook Pro, aside from the crappy name, is the same styling and finish as the current PowerBook, albeit with a built-in video camera and an Intel chip.

These are the "machines we want to build?" Really? It sounds very "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," donchathink? ("Behold! We transitioned to Intel so we could produce machines identical to ones we were producing with PowerPC processors!")

Yeah, right. Trust me: this is dipping the proverbial toe in the water.

A little history: back in the late 1990s, as the PowerPC 601/603/604 architecture was getting long in the tooth, Apple had a popular 603-based PowerBook, the 3400. When the G3 processor came out, it offered substantial performance advantages over the 60x-series architecture, and Apple engineers promptly crammed it into the 3400 chassis, christening it the "PowerBook G3." It ran hot, but it ran, and for power-hungry early adopters, it was a wicked-fast laptop.

Not much later, Apple introduced radically-redesigned G3-based laptops, code-named "WallStreet" that blew away the industry with their industrial design and performance. The v1 G3 PowerBook, for all the hoo-ha on introduction, was just a placeholder. And so, too, I suspect, are these new machines. (Interestingly, some parts of the blogosphere agree with me.)

The true purpose of these machines is to goad the Apple developer community. "Look," Apple is saying, "We're not kidding about this Intel thing. Get on the stick and convert your application to something that works natively on Intel. We're moving fast, and you better keep up." Now that Apple has real, live, paying Intel-based customers, the folks over at Adobe et. al are far more incented to get their conversion groove on. And that's what Tuesday was all about.

Mark my words: the next act is the really good one. We're going to get something different and special. And that's a show I'll buy a ticket to see.

UPDATE, August 5, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at January 12, 2006 9:50 PM. Posted to Apple.

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