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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Scrutchins who wrote (7839)	1/19/1998 3:51:00 PM
From: Eric Yang	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

I was looking forward to the CHRP computers for this reason, and now I am looking forward to getting a Mac of some sort with a yellow box if it will give me virtually native speed for software from the PC world. This will allow me to have the best of both platforms. IMHO, I think there are a lot of consumers and even businesses out there who will shift to Macs under this scenario. I am surprised that Apple has not hyped such capabilities in their advertisements. Sam, the problem is that Rhapsody alone wouldn't allow Apple to achieve full compatibility. There are several options available to Apple to but at this point no one knows if any of these plans will work and thus it's probably too early to hype the whole thing. Yellow box will make applications written for it very portable between platforms. So we have very little to worry about in terms of new yellow box compliant applications. The problem is with current off the shelf X86 programs. There are two challenges we face with these programs. 1. They make Windows API calls. (Thus dependent on MSFT OS codes) 2. They are compiled for X86 processors (none PPC instruction set) There are several possible solutions that may be available to Apple. 1. Make a redbox in Rhapsody with the help of MSFT and add OS level X86 emulator. Pro/Con: While none native it would provide reasonable performace to the user. 2. Rhapsody/yellow box running on Intel chips. Pro/Con: yellowbox and current X86 appls both running native. Won't be able to run Mac apps and Apple doesn't benefit in terms of selling hardware unless it goes into selling X86/Intel boxes. 3. Merced to the rescue!!? Yes, I hate Intel but Merced may be good for Apple. If it fails..awsome! Intel takes a blow and PowerPC gains ground. If it succeeds and deliver what it promises...great! Apple will be making Macs with Merced. Merced will level the playing field since its built-in x86 compatibility circuitry takes care of most of the compatibility problems. The remaining issue is current PPC based applications. But if Merced offers wonderful performance it would be possible for Apple to make an emulators for PPC without much performance penalty. What may be the worse case scenario is if Merced turns out to have unimpressive performance but with the marketing hype of Intel still manage to become the dominate processor in the PC industry. In that case it would be difficult for Apple to justify abandoning the superior PPC and spend the engineering effort to switch to Merced. Then we're back to where we are today...a superior product but small market share. Eric