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The Intel Advantage Apple's transition to Intel was presented as an effort to take advantage of Intel's compelling future road map, not a desperate bid to replace a sagging PowerPC hardware architecture. There is however an immediate advantage that Intel processors provide for Apple now. |
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Intel's x86 processors give Apple access to the benefits of a much larger market. Competition between Intel and AMD generates a steady stream of technical advances. While Intel has faltered in attempts to introduce new x86 processors as well as replace the x86 entirely (with the IA-64 Itanium processor), the broad sales base of commodity PCs ensures profits that weather out such missteps. Of course, this much larger market also benefits Apple in that Intel processors offer native compatibility with code written for the greater PC world's mainstream computers. This compatibility has been held as an important requisite in computing platforms since IBM introduced the PC, and was reaffirmed as Microsoft's Windows re-intrenched the PC as the defacto standard. But this insistence on PC compatibility has actually doomed many alternative platforms in the last twenty years of computing. Attempts to offer PC compatibility have not only been ineffective in saving platforms, but also served as a contributing factor in their failure. What operating system tried harder than IBM's OS/2 to be a "better DOS than DOS, and a better Windows than Windows?" The attempt to offer seamless compatibility not only exhausted IBM's development efforts, but also effectively killed the development of a unique software base. Why develop for OS/2 customers, when they can just run the DOS version? In contrast, the Macintosh has always been sold on the strength of its own native applications. Today's widespread availability of highly portable, open source code means that PC-compatibility has never mattered less. Certain Windows-only apps and PC games are a notable exception. Part II > Being PC |
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