Since WWDC I've been thinking about a possibility in Apple's OS strategy which I nicknamed Diamond. Essentially it's the possibility of porting MacOS X and specifically Carbon to run on X86. It's just speculation at this point but if true the implication is earth shattering.
I've been thinking the same thing. My first question, like yours, was: Is it possible? The consensus seems to be that it is.
The next question, though, may be much tougher: How can Apple implement this strategy? There are huge dangers involved in it. The lesson of IBM and OS/2 is a severe one--if Apple becomes compatible in some way with Wintel, it may give developers no reason to code for MacOS, and users no reason to buy a PowerPC Mac. There's no question that pre-announcements of any kind would dampen sales of PowerPC boxes (people would wait, or buy PCs which could run both OSs, both of which would hurt Apple's bottom line), so we're not likely to see anything concrete from Apple until they're ready to act. Which may explain why WWDC was so confusing.
So if/when Apple acts on an Intel offering, they will have some kind of plan in place to cover any potential losses in PowerPC box sales. This can occur in two ways: selling an expensive OS, or selling Intel hardware. The only way to sell an expensive OS would be if it was targeted at the high end, like a Merced server or something. But that doesn't address the market share problem. So it seems likely that, at some point, Apple will make and sell Intel hardware.
Okay, so Apple sells Intel hardware. That means they're competing with all the sharks in the Wintel sea. And talk about an inventory forecasting nightmare: how can they predict which brand of CPU people will want to run MacOS? Probably the best way to solve that and other problems would be as a Dell-style build-to-order mail order house, perhaps with a CompUSA and a few others to cover retail. There would, of course, be one big difference besides the OS: one of the options is CPU, PowerPC or Intel. All other hardware is standard. This scenario would be totally ideal, in my view.
rhet0ric |
