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June 06, 2005
OS X Intel builds
Well, Apple announced today that they're moving to Intel. Wild!
I'm pretty pleased with this development, especially because now all the player haters get to eat crow. There were so many people saying that it couldn't be done, that the porting would be too tough, that Apple would lose market share... Well, the market share part is yet to be determined, but I think a move to Intel can only spell good news for Apple.
And one can only hope that as time goes on, OS X gains more market share. It's my favorite development platform, both for the ease of development, and wide range of features developers can use to build their apps. I don't know if Apple would ever just sell the OS and let it run on any type of x86 hardware, but pretty soon, developers will have the luxury of a single architecture that can more or less run Windows or OS X. How many people will stick with Windows, given the glut of spyware and viruses? I'm hoping there are more cheap Mac Mini-like machines coming down the road as well.
The other great upside is that video cards should speed up again. I don't think the drivers will be swappable, but at least we won't need separate video cards for our Macs anymore. You never know on the driver front though, FreeBSD 6 has support for using binary windows network drivers, so maybe there's some magic glue that will let OS X take advantage of the tuned windows video card drivers. Either way, I'm hoping that Leopard will be spending time on OpenGL performance, since Tiger is fast on the UI side, but not as fast as it could be when crunching OpenGL for things like video or image servers.
Posted by djb at June 6, 2005 12:37 PM