Apple, NeXT step..

[Iliah]

http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM,+switch+to+Intel+chips/2100-1006_3-5731398.html?tag=nefd.lede

 

[dagored]

As Long as OS X runs on it and Nikon Capture and PSCS, etc. I will still be happy.

 

[Cory Cooper]

I really don't think this will happen...been down this road many times before.

If it does, it won't be Macs running Pentium/Xeon chips, it will be Intel manufacturing processors that are still proprietary to running the Mac OS. Apple has been disappointed recently with IBM's yield and production schedule/capacity.

It would be more likey to see Apple partner with AMD.

C

 

[Chris101]

I kind of agree Cory. They'd have to work on those Intel chips to run Tiger or whatever, on top of Darwin, on top of a BSD kernel, all on the Pentium instruction set. Of course Apple has an interesting marketing department (similar to a Japanese camera company we all know and love) and might not be surprised by a new Mac ad campaign exhorting us to 'slow down and compute at a more relaxed pace.'

(This isn't to say that intel machines don't run Windows at blazingly fast speeds. The Power PC G series is optomized to run the cascading UNIX system that OSX is comprised of and the Pentium isn't.)

 

[Iliah]

For some time already emulators of Mac permit to run Panther pretty well on a PC. The necessary migration STEP is already here

 

[TOF guy]

Hopefully Apple won't go away the way Next did (which does not exist anymore).

I just can't see Apple being a profitable PC vendor, even with their own OS. Maybe a prelude to just ditch the whole PC division and focus on their new ipod et al. business.

That would be sad !

Thierry

 

[Man-Fai Wong]

Interesting turn of events. I'm out of the loop w/ most things Apple and had not seen much mention of NeXTStep in a long time -- last thing I read was Sun trying to make use of OpenStep (the underlying cross-platform OS that came about from NeXTStep) for Solaris long ago. And in this new article, I do not see any mention of NeXT either. Is there something I'm missing?

BTW, I still remember being a guinea pig for the NeXT Cube w/ OS v0.8 back in my college days in the late 80's. And I still have a paid copy of their very first official release of NeXTStep (v3?) for the Intel platform from circa '93 gathering dust nearby in original packaging -- think I finally dumped the hardcopy manuals sometime last year. :mrgreen: Back then, I thought NeXTStep was soooo cool that I bought that release of the OS well before I ever owned my own PC -- and installed it at work for a little tinkering and some minor uses. How many releases followed? Just one, IIRC, before Win95/NT squashed any hope for its success on Intel platform (and also stole quite a bit of its GUI/look-and-feel even though many people assume that Microsoft only "borrowed" from the Mac OS). :lol: And to me, even now, .NET itself reminds me a fair bit of NeXTStep's development platform, but reworked for web development also, instead of just traditional client/server systems.

_Man_

 

[Iliah]

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,67767,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3 second page, Rosetta emulator