Mike Schaeffer's Blog

I ran across this quote the other day from I, cringely:

The market has stupidly decided that Intel microprocessors are better than Apple's preferred PowerPCs, so Apple will be at a disadvantage trying to sell PowerPC machines into the Intel market. This is what's right now killing Silicon Graphics, which is finding rough going pitting its MIPS processors against Intel. ... Yes, Apple will build computers with Intel processors. Their aim, as in all of these products, is for the high end. Based on Intel's new Merced chip, the new Apple machine will have PCI slots, Universal Serial Bus, Fast Ethernet, IEEE 1394 FireWire, IRDA, DIMM sockets, but no ISA slots and no backwards compatibility to DOS. So this is NOT a PC in the strictest sense, since it will only run Rhapsody, but not System 8 or Windows NT. It will run Mac applications inside Rhapsody. And because Apple is both the author of Rhapsody and the designer of this machine, Jobs believes that more customers will want to buy their Rhapsody wrapped in Apple hardware than not.

Funny thing is... that quote is from October of 1997. A lot has changed since then, but since the core reasoning was sound it probably shouldn't be too much of a suprise that he was ultimately right.

The other interesting bit was that Cringely wrote that piece around 1997, which is when the NDA for 'Project Star Trek' expired. Star Trek was a project in which a few Apple, Novell, and Intel software engineers got MacOS 7 running on PC hardware. I'm not sure what the business story would've been, but it was a nice technical accomplishment nonetheless.

I haven't had as much time to play with it as I'd like, but the laptop arrived today. In the hour I've had it running, so far I'm quite impressed. A couple quick thoughts:

• I like the keyboard: nice and solid. Since the layout is more like a Dell D600 than a D400 (what I have from work), there'll be a little getting used to it. The D400 layout puts page up and page down near the arrow keys, which I've gotten used to for reading documents. The I6000 (and D600/D800) puts page up and page down up near the display. If that gets too obnoxious, I might have to investigate remapping some of the media keys on the front of the machine to more useful keys.
• I love the WUXGA (1900x1200, approx.) display. The machine came from the factory with large icons enabled and set to 120dpi. Set up that way, it seems readable enough to me, but my vision is so far correctable to 20/20. If smaller text adds to fatigue or is harder to read on a bouncy train, it'll be possible to enlarge text through preferences, so I'm not worried about it at all. At this point, the 1024x768 D400 is going to feel very cramped.
• Dell still dumps its machines full of software. This machine came with several broadband offers, four media players, and a bunch of modem stuff. Most of that's getting uninstalled in the name of system stability. I already have broadband, I don't use streaming media that much, and I haven't used a modem in years.
• XP Media edition looks the same as XP Pro, so far.

I just placed an order for a Dell Inspiron 6000D, using one of Dell's recent $750 off deals. With any luck, it'll ship in a couple weeks. In the course of doing research on the machine, I found this site describing James Carter's experiences with the machine. It is without a doubt the best, most comprehensive laptop review I have ever seen. If you write a product review for a laptop computer, you should emulate this.

Something else worth mentioning is that laptop vendors typically use standard parts in their hardware. While they don't publicize part numbers (partially so they can switch suppliers), it is possible to find datasheets describing things like LCD panels. While it takes some inference to figure out what part is being used, this can reveal statistics about LCD panels that might otherwise be hard to find. While Google is your friend, this site has a bunch of links to useful datasheets.

PS: I've ordered the WUXGA (>2 Megapixels, ~140dpi) display with the 128MB Radeon X300 video adapter. If on screen content isn't too small, I expect the detail to be fabulous. I'll post comments (and screenshots) when I get some experience with the machine.

I didn't believe it was possible when I first heard the rumors a few weeks ago, but Here it is: Apple will transition to x86, specifically Intel, in 2006. The whole line will go x86 in 2007. Microsoft is behind the switch, as is Adobe. Interestingly, the developer transition kit has an Intel compiler at its core. I wonder why not GCC.

The next question is how well it will be pulled off. In theory it could be seamless. It needs to be.