[fluidinclusion]

Well, I WAS planning on buying a new iMac, but I've changed my mind. However, it's not because of the PPC to Intel transition, it's because of Apple's sleazy policy of disabling extended desktop capability in the iMac. I'm not buying an expensive and huge Powermac just so I can add second monitor capabilities available on a $400 PC. However, I don't want to use Windows either.

P.S.
Please don't tell me to hack my open firmware using some foreign software to change the iMacs abilities. I'm not voiding my warranty or compromising my machine just to get functionality that should already be there.

[mouse]

I bought my 20", 2.0Ghz iMAC about 3 weeks before the Intel announcement. It is gorgeous, fast, and I love it. After the announcement, I went home, woke up my iMac, and amazingly enough, it was still, gorgeous, fast and I still loved it. I know it will be a great machine for the next 3 years until I'm ready to upgrade, which will probably be about the time that the Intel transition is complete.
People are acting like come June 1, 2006, that ALL Macs will suddenly have Intel processors, the PPC will be completely forgotten and ALL support for PPC will be dropped.
The reality is that this transition is likely to take several years to be complete and a computer purchased today will still be supported for several years, or more.

[sigma8]

I don't think this is any surprise. Everyone seems to more or less be on the same page, but are talking about tangent (or completely unrelated) topics. Basically, anyone who can wait, is going to wait. The people who will be buying will be the people that either buy macs on a regular basis because they are total mac nuts with cash to burn, or are companies who more or less do the same thing to stay up to date with current technology.
Anyone who was waiting for the "next big thing" in macs--which is a lot of people I'm sure, since Apple's cachet is largely due to introducing "big things"--will probably wait until the new systems are released.
I had been planning on buying a G5 desktop, I was just waiting for an upgrade to it, but I'm not going to bother now. One of the things I was going to do on it was play World of Warcraft, and given the announcement, I doubt Blizzard is going to fulfill its promise of fully optimizing the game on PPC, since it runs decent right now anyway (just not as well as it should), and they have a new beast to worry about.

[spimster]

Noper.
The announcement to me was, "Well, that's interesting. Next year it starts, eh?"
I need new machines today. The announcement didn't affect my particular purchase decisions.
So, my son just got a new Mini, and I'm wrestling with whether to replace my 2000 G4 with an iMac, or the lower-end dual desktop.
Now, when the rev 2 Intel laptops eventually come out, I'm going to give them a serious look.

[salmonstk]

Buy a PowerPC mac for christ's sake...
An Intel Mac will not tun all software navivly from day 1. A PowerPC mac will. It will also continue to run all future software as developers will create universal binaries.
I see no reason not to buy a PowerPC mac except for those who were holding out for a G5 Powerbook. In that case if one never materializes I can see waiting for an Intel powerbook.

[fluidinclusion]

Actually, it looks like some important software from Crossover will ONLY run on Intel Macs. I suspect all the "mid-level" Windows developers they say will be able to easily port to Mac will also only port for MACINTEL - not PPC. Like it or not, PPC is DEAD, unless you're a web surfer. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

[rjwill246]

And that is the message that Apple needs to get out. Apple will continue to support the PPC platform, as will most if not all, major 3rd parties, well beyond the transition, because the MacTel (??) base will not be huge for a few years. Apple does need to address the issues that were raised however because the tendency for people is to latch onto the negative and make it become a "fact" and, despite some readers not caring about the stock price, it is of concern if it plummets for no good reason. The effect on Apple of dropping from $37 to $15 would NOT be good for anyone who has any interest in seeing Apple remain viable, not to mention single and institutional investors. They can only recover so many times from such dramatic shifts.

[vaporman]

In reply to:

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I never heard anyone say I'm not buying another car until that one comes out because Chevrolet will probably stop servicing my car.

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If the concept car didn't run on gas and there was a decent likelyhood that it would cause gas stations to go away within the next year you might see some people think twice about buying that Chevrolet.

[moose_n_squirrel]

In reply to:

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Like it or not, PPC is DEAD, unless you're a web surfer.

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PPC will not and cannot be dead for at least 2.5 years. That will be six months after Jobs' claims that all Macs will be Intel, giving people time to actually buy these things in volume across the entire product line. PPC's death is probably more like 3+ years out because for PPC to be dead, enough people must buy Intel Macs to pass PPC as the majority of the Mac installed base. Until PPC market share disappears, Mac developers must also code for PPC in order to sell a meaningful amount of software. Standard computer depreciation is 3 years, so for business purposes a PPC bought today will become fully depreciated before it loses its software support. Therefore..."He's not dead yet!"

[minderbinder]

"Can you say, "Mac mini media center"?"
Um...I just did. And I also said that digital audio alone isn't enough to make an AV jukebox, you also need video tuner/input and the ability to encode video real time. I'd love to see a mini AV, but since it would probably require a dedicated codec chip or a way faster processor (as well as digital audio IO and a video tuner), it would necessarily be quite a bit more expensive than the current minis. It would be a seperate, more expensive model, not something that could be added to all minis (yet).
As I also said, you can make it a media center now, it just requires a couple peripherals. Is there enough demand for AV features now to justify adding features that are already available with third-party add ons?

"I never heard anyone say I'm not buying another car until that one comes out because Chevrolet will probably stop servicing my car."
Bad analogy. A better analogy would be if Chevy announced that in a year they'd switch to making 100% electric cars and would never make one that ran on gas again. In that case, I'm sure there would be people who would wait.
"it's a non-ussue, they click one box and poof"
It's an oversimplification. Programmers not using Xcode have a LOT of work to do, and any processor specific optimizations still must be done individually for each platform. An app may run on both, but it may be vastly faster on one platform if the other hasn't been optimized. Similarly, a macintel version of an app may be far slower than a windows version on the same hardware if it lacks that optimization. Also, you ignore the increased testing cycle.
Users don't care about stock price. But they do care about market share and availablity of compatible apps, which definitely has a chance of being effected by this switch.
I think those who predict apple's death based on this are just being alarmist. I think a dip in sales until the next release is likely, but if ipod goes strong apple can tough it out (they have pretty deep pockets right now). I think some mac users may switch to windows, but the new platform will appeal to switchers and more users may be gained and lost.
It depends on the smoothness of the switch, how well Rosetta works, how many developers stay on mac, whether the box easily runs windows, etc. The biggest factor will be if the new boxes are more price competitive with windoze, or if prices are comparable to today's mac. If macs can get cheaper, there's definitely a chance of increasing market share.

[mdawson]

Well, my current Mac is a 500 MHz G4 Cube so waiting for the Intel Macs to hit the market is not an option for me. I plan on buying a 20-inch iMac G5 some time after August. Personally, I would prefer to get a PowerMac, but as Apple only makes gargantuan tower systems for their professional line this is not feasible for me. Aside from that, as a few others have mentioned the first generation Intel-based Macs will have kinks that will need to be worked out and I really do not have the time to be a hardware beta tester.
Apples track record with backwards compatibility and support of older systems is far better than just about anyone on the Wintel sideand do realize that regardless of how much any given PC OEM may want to support older systems they are ultimately at the mercy of Microsofts specs for the latest versions of Windows (and Redmond could care less if your two year old PC can run the latest incarnation of their OS)so I have no concerns about PowerPC systems support disappearing at the end of 2007; it will not happen. As dankoDhun mentioned, Tiger is the first version of OS X to not support the original iMac from 1998. Apple created the Classic environment to smooth the transition to OS X for Mac users. Microsoft has never made such transitions between versions of Windows with major backwards compatibilities issues easy.

[mdawson]

In reply to:

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fluidinclusion wrote:
Well, I WAS planning on buying a new iMac, but I've changed my mind. However, it's not because of the PPC to Intel transition, it's because of Apple's sleazy policy of disabling extended desktop capability in the iMac. I'm not buying an expensive and huge Powermac just so I can add second monitor capabilities available on a $400 PC.

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Since when is the iMac a PowerMac. The iMac is a consumer-level Mac and therefore has a feature set that one would expect in a consumer targeted machine. Yes, having a PowerPC G5 processor under the hood does make it potentially more powerful than most consumer-level machines, but it is still not a member of Apples professional line of computers.

[Machound]

Actually, tons of people are already using Minis for media centers connected to their plasma / LCD / projector TV. It works pretty well for most people with a couple of notable exceptions: There's no way to hear Dolby Digital or DTS sound, and problems exist with the DVI port not having enough power for longer DVI cables (more than 6 feet) and sometimes insufficient power even for Apple's own short cable. Not surprisingly, the 1.25 GHz Mini drops video frames more often than the 1.42 GHz Mini.
Quite a few people want to be able to play DVDs on their Mini attached to a wide screen TV and DD/DTS receiver. It works pretty well EXCEPT for No Dolby Digital and No DTS audio. Yes, it is possible to buy one of the M-Audio boxes to get digital audio over USB or FireWire, but those products are prone to frequent software breakage and they require constant attention from M-Audio to update the Core Audio links with each OS point-release. Who wants to deal with all that inconvenience and potential for lost functionality? Who wants yet another box connected to their Mini just to get audio?
The requirements for a fully functional Mac Mini HTPC are those I listed in my post at the top of this thread, along with a decision from Apple to support GPU-based MPEG-2 decoding in CoreVideo. DVD Player has such functionality but none of the remaining Mac OS does. Acquiring video from digital and analog sources has many good solutions already, some of which are free (Apple's own Virtual dVHS) and some require a purchase (ElGato, etc.)
I don't believe video playback is a niche market. The biggest limiting factor for the Mini is the lack of digital audio output. Do we really need to buy an iMac G5, dual G5 or 17 inch PowerBook to get it?

[fluidinclusion]

Yeah, but this is one of many examples where Apple purposely CRIPPLES the computer to prevent functionality of hardware that is already there in the machine. Even Microsoft DOES NOT DO THIS! /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif