Prepare for the coming MacTel revolution

By MICHAEL FRALEY

On the Web, the discussion boards have been fierce, as some lifelong Apple devotees are swearing that they’re going to jump ship, and other lovers of all things Apple are trying to calm down their buddies, chastising them for getting overworked about something that’s no big deal.

To someone standing on the outside looking in at the cult of Apple, you can wonder what the fuss is all about. Apple is leaving behind its past commitments to Motorola and IBM chips. So what? Intel is the leading microprocessor manufacturer on the planet, right? Perhaps this all makes sense.

To the devotee, this is Apple being seduced by the dark side of the Force, and Emperor Jobs isn’t making it any easier.

In the short term, this probably means that Apple’s G5 machines are going to be viewed as the “lame ducks” of the computer world. After all, who’s going to invest in a new computer that contains technology headed for certain extinction within a year or two? Apple can promise support for their old technology all they want, some people are just not going to be convinced. As a result, I’m going to go with the common wisdom and predict a slump in sales until the new Mac OS 10.5 Leopard machines with the Pentium M chip come out.

This is a decision that has been years in the making, and Jobs has admitted that in Apple’s labs, OS X machines have been running with Intel chips from the very beginning. This actually surprised me until I put it together with another piece of information I’ve long known: the underpinning of OS X is Unix. Unix is strong, stable, has been around since the late 1960’s, and has spawned variants/copycats such as Linux and FreeBSD. As Lawrence Charters wrote in a 2002 Washington Apple Pi Journal (www.wap.org) article, Apple has decided to give its customers a combination of something old (Unix), something new (the emerging desktop and notebook technologies) and something comfortably familiar (an OS that kinda-sorta looks like OS 9.2). Adding an Intel chip to something that is already an eclectic blend shouldn’t be a surprise at all.

And yet it is a surprise. According to Anandtech (www.anandtech.com), AMD chips already outgun Intel’s. Some have said that simply because Apple is promoting Intel, we shouldn’t assume that the same machines couldn’t run an AMD chip. True, but as Anandtech tells us in its report on the Apple trade show, “driver support for AMD platforms may not necessarily be there.”

A Mac with an Intel chip will finally be able to have the Windows OS installed on it. However, from what I understand, precautions will be taken to make sure that the Mac OS can’t be installed on a Windows box. However, knowing how wireheads love a challenge, it may be inevitable.

In the end, lovers of the Apple Macintosh will have a tough decision to make. From a philosophical standpoint, just what IS a Mac? It isn’t the chip, which will be from Intel — and which in the past has been provided by Motorola or IBM anyway. It won’t exactly be the OS, which is built on top of Unix. The motherboard will be Apple technology — but does a motherboard alone make a computer an alternative to the other machines sold in stores across the country? Is that what we’re left with — an image, an entire culture, wrapped around a motherboard?

All right, perhaps that last sentence was a bit overdramatic. Still, it’s worth thinking about. When the vital parts and even a good chunk of the OS is strung together from the same sources many other manufacturers use, what makes a Mac “alternative”? Are the Apple hardware and software developers more like good cooks who can take common ingredients and work their own magic with them?

Apple has the opportunity to gain in many ways from this alliance, but what it has lost — its distinctiveness — may be a difficult thing to recapture.