"Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?"
It's fucking moot if IBM won't develop it any faster or smaller while Intel does both. Three years from now, with 4GHz x86 Intel CPUs on the market, if Apple was still making 2.5GHz Macs and unable to even put those in laptops, sales would flatline.
IBM decided to play it safe on PPC development by throwing in with console gaming where (for now) form factor's irrelevant, chip heat's irrelevant, developers won't embarrass your platform for not advancing, and the public's demands are modest. And they'll succeed anyway, even if they lost a sizeable chunk of mainstream developers.
"Question 2: What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?"
Do your fucking homework, Cringely. OS X is largely 32-bit, and programmer guidelines repeatedly discouraged 64-bit dev, in some cases making it impossible (Objective-C won't compile 64-bit code under XCode).
"Question 3: Where the heck is AMD?"
You're SJ and you've just been corporately embarrassed for the third time in your company's history by a chipmaker's whims or lack of ability. Time to switch. Your choices are the following:
- Blue chip industry leader with zero manufacturing problems and a drooling fascination with your company. Modest current product but secure pipeline.
- Company with brilliant ideas but a lot less time in the business, a shaky record and a snarky CEO responsible for one of those embarrassing episodes.
"Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?"
Translated: "Osborne effect, Osborne effect, Osborne effect." First off, this announcement was at WWDC, not Macworld (where you debut product about to hit shelves). Even if they've busted ass for five years to make the transition easy, they have to tell the coders/manufacturers soon enough to iron out the bugs. There was no way in hell they could have been making these in secret for a year and then spring them on everyone Monday, and dropping the bomb simultaneous to releasing the product is suicide given the limitations of Rosetta.
Apple wants this box to sing, not oink, and that'll take reeducation camp for the remaining CodeWarrior developers who figured they'd never have to migrate to XCode. From Apple's perspective, CodeWarrior = Motorola, and the objective fact is that CW's backed off from both Win/Mac development in favor of embedded systems.
That said, IMO a six month window would have been a smarter compromise; more pressure on small developers, with the implicit assumption that migration isn't all that hard. Given the rumors of how little modding it took Apple to make a G5 box into a Pentium box, it may not take twelve months to retool and go to market.
"Question 5: Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?"
No. Pull your head out of your ass. Apple has much better inside relations with the recording/film industry than Microsoft, and in case you forgot, SJ runs a business which is directly part of the film industry. If the industry demanded that the next gen movie format require a hardware chip to encode and another to decode, there'd be no reason or advantage to make it CPU dependent -- in fact, doing so would make it easier to reverse engineer by crackers, DMCA be damned.
Cringely goes on to say that Intel hates Microsoft. The only thing Intel hates is not having money, and Microsoft can't exactly turn the screws on Intel beyond ensuring that one particular line of processors continues to generate obscene revenues for Intel.
Cringely hints that HP could become Apple's "hardware partner." This one's been pulled out of the woodwork for close to a decade, on par with Tandy becoming Apple's OEM. Somehow I don't see the Taiwanese who make Macs giving much of a damn which yellow haired devils are paying their $2/hour wages, or Apple deriving a particular benefit from this partnership. It's debatable what Apple and HP view as the benefit of selling branded iPods, beyond HP's distribution network (why you can buy iPods at Radio Shack).
Intel has enough money to buy Microsoft, never mind Apple. Antitrust legislation is what keeps them out of the OS market, not missed opportunities or alliances. That doesn't mean they can't milk their relationship with Apple "in Apple's best interest," of course, and it's something SJ expects them to do.
Expect to see Intel pressuring Apple to come out with smaller and smaller devices, and continually providing the hardware to make it possible. You're laughing now, but right now there are $130 battery-powered Linux-based x86 computers on cards small enough to fit inside an iPod Shuffle (or close enough).
Jobs was right, if hurried, about ditching the Newton. Palm did an excellent job stewarding the only platform you can't replace with Linux, but after 10+ years the Palm economy is hurting as it becomes further and further removed from general purpose OSes going into smaller and smaller places. OS development there has stagnated considerably, with nothing new to show each year except more expensive models losing ground to laptops. Palm's splitting its own product line into thirds: disposable contacts managers for students, phones for salesmen, and ur-laptops price competitive with nothing.
Prediction's a fool's game. What I will say is that Jobs saw the trend away from desktops and toward laptops, understood IBM wasn't interested in making that possible for Apple, and Jobs took the only road he could to stay in the game.
If you visualize a 7x10 tablet Mac with a wireless keyboard, a cover that hinges back into an easel for QuickTime 7 theatre DVD playback or Grand Theft Auto pimpin', a more visual jukebox interface for iTunes, and a considerably less junked up Finder, that's your business.
Me, I have a more specific vision of the next WWDC surprise, but I can't say. Too early.
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