apple gets a pretty decent discount from intel for being an intel-exclusive shop, so i say fat chance to [apple becoming an amd customer] for a long, long time.. besides, i think from a business practice standpoint, apple is much more in line with intel, as amd built their business on reverse-engineering and ripping off intel's chip designs (microsoft, anyone?)

Unless Intel does something really stupid, Apple will never use AMD. Why? One word, LOYALTY. Steve Jobs didn't invite Intel's CEO Paul Otellini on his stage just to stab him in the back later on. Write what you will about Steve Jobs, but I think that if you gain his trust, he'll be your best business partner.

George

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Anonymous wrote:
Unless Intel does something really stupid, Apple will never use AMD. Why? One word, LOYALTY. Steve Jobs didn't invite Intel's CEO Paul Otellini on his stage just to stab him in the back later on. Write what you will about Steve Jobs, but I think that if you gain his trust, he'll be your best business partner.

George

Tell that to Motorola/IBM.

Didn't they stab him in the back for being useless (the lateness, not the chips)?

But really; Apple stayed with Motorola chips for a very, very long time.

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Guest wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:
Unless Intel does something really stupid, Apple will never use AMD. Why? One word, LOYALTY. Steve Jobs didn't invite Intel's CEO Paul Otellini on his stage just to stab him in the back later on. Write what you will about Steve Jobs, but I think that if you gain his trust, he'll be your best business partner.

George

Tell that to Motorola/IBM.

Intel and Motorola did something stupid. What? Not producing faster chips (3GHz, spending more development time on XBox, Wii, PS3, etc). Sure that made perfect business sense to them [IBM], but not Apple. They lied (no 3GHz) so Apple was free and clear to leave and certainly it was no stab in the back when they did.

George

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Guest wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:
Unless Intel does something really stupid, Apple will never use AMD. Why? One word, LOYALTY. Steve Jobs didn't invite Intel's CEO Paul Otellini on his stage just to stab him in the back later on. Write what you will about Steve Jobs, but I think that if you gain his trust, he'll be your best business partner.

George

Tell that to Motorola/IBM.

Not producing a 3 GHz G5 counted as stupid, and not producing a G4 chip that is competitive for a laptop machine also counted as stupid. Not improving on Core2Duo for the next ten years would count as "something really stupid". If Intel does that, Apple will be going with AMD, that should be obvious.

On the other hand, if Intel falls lets say ten percent behind AMD in speed for some chips, but not for others, then Apple will stay with Intel. AMD would have to be dramatically better than Intel in all areas for Apple to consider switching.

What do you need a 3Ghz chip for when PPC is inherently faster than X86? Or so I used to tell people.

Remember that Apple once said PPC was just as fast if not faster then Intel. Now that Apple uses Intel, it's saying it’s faster than the PPC. If Mhz doesn't matter anymore, why should it matter if you are at 2.5 Ghz or 3 Ghz.

You have to take it with a grain of salt and realize that it’s all about marketing at the end of the day.

Me, I'm a PPC holdout for as long as possible (easily 5 more years on my 2 Ghz G5 iMac). I'll wait until then to see what kind of chip will power my new Mac. Will it be Intel, AMD - or even Motorola again - who knows. The only thing I'm sure about is that I will buy a Mac again-no matter what the processor!

Remember that Apple once said PPC was just as fast if not faster then Intel.

I'm trying to figure out if this is a botched attempt at sarcasm or not, because this is just some dumbass logic. Did you seriously take those ads to mean that Intel would NEVER surpass the performance of the G3? (Which I believe was current when those ads ran.) Your picture shows a Pentium 2. When that chip was out, the shipping PPC G3 chips were clearly faster, and consumed far less power, giving them an enormous advantage for laptops.

For most of the PowerPC's 10 year history, it stayed competitive with Intel, often developing clear, if temporary, leads in performance, cost, or power usage. This held true right up to the G5. At that moment, IBM seemed to have the whole world in it's hands, with all three next-gen videogame consoles. But then they blew it and lost Apple. (Perhaps they wanted to force Apple on to the Cell?)

Meanwhile Intel finally figured out that all those Gigahertz were useless if the chip couldn't run _programs_ faster, and proved Apple's "megahertz myth" right with the Core chips.

So Apple got out at exactly the right time, as far as I can see. The Pentium 4 remains inferior to the G5, but there is no next gen from IBM to match the Core. Apple has never been about devotion to technology. It is about looking at the big picture and seeing what REALLY works.

Yes, it was sarcasm (apparently botched).
From guest:

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Intel and Motorola did something stupid. What? Not producing faster chips

you said it yourself Guest:

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Meanwhile Intel finally figured out that all those Gigahertz were useless if the chip couldn't run _programs_ faster, and proved Apple's "megahertz myth" right with the Core chips.

So again I ask if Mhz doesn't matter anymore, why should it matter if you are at 2.5 Ghz or 3 Ghz.

and what about this:

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Unless Intel does something really stupid, Apple will never use AMD. Why? One word, LOYALTY.

IMO and experience loyalty plays some part in business, but not a lot. If AMD had a better "roadmap" than Intel, Apple would go with AMD, and I say this after the switch from Moto to Intel for this very reason. As you said:

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Apple has never been about devotion to technology. It is about looking at the big picture and seeing what REALLY works.

If you re-read my last paragraph you'll (maybe) understand where I'm coming from. I'm a PPC holdout because my G5 iMac is only one and a half years old - I'll easily get 5 more years of use out of it. It doesn't matter what processor Apple uses 5 years from now - I'll still buy a Mac!

if Mhz doesn't matter anymore, why should it matter if you are at 2.5 Ghz or 3 Ghz.

::Groan:: No one ever said that Mhz doesn't matter - that is a straw man argument. The Megahertz Myth is the assumption that you can compare chips of different architectures by clock speed alone.

I'm a PPC holdout because my G5 iMac is only one and a half years old - I'll easily get 5 more years of use out of it.

This at least makes sense. You buy a new computer when you can't get your current one to do what you want.

I apparently have to work on my sarcasm.

You are right algr about the Mhz myth. After reading my post again, I realize I'm comparing apples to apples, not to oranges.

What I was trying to refer to was Guest's comments about Moto not producing a faster chip. Faster is not always better. Also the comment about loyalty doesn't fly with me. I work for a rather large corporation, and I've seen customers of 15 years go with the competition simply because of a slight price difference. Loyalty only goes so far if you are in business - and why are we in business - to make money - .

That being said, I could honestly not care less what processor is in my Mac, as long as I can run the Mac OS.

I don't think we'll see Apple using AMD for a long time, unless something really extreme happens. One of the biggest advantages to switching from PPC to x86 was that they know they can rely on Intel to provide chips in quantity. Does anyone remember the last PPC Power Mac that was introduced with enough supply to meet the demand? I don't — but I'm pretty sure it had a G3 inside, not a G4 or G5. Apple doesn't want to deal with that again, so staying with the bigger company is an advantage.

Could Apple use both Intel and AMD chips? I'm not sure. Intel's been known for anticompetitive practices almost as bad as Microsoft's. It would almost certainly hurt Apple's standing with Intel. It might not be a deal-breaker, but it's another barrier, at least.

For these reasons, AMD would need to provide something that simply blew Intel out of the water to motivate Apple to use their chips. AMD's chips have been (arguably) better than Intel's for years, but have they been better enough to outweigh these problems from a business perspective? Personally, I don't think so.

I hope Apple does use AMD chips in the future — competition and flexibility are good — but I just don't see it happening.

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burreyeann wrote:
Also the comment about loyalty doesn't fly with me. I work for a rather large corporation, and I've seen customers of 15 years go with the competition simply because of a slight price difference. Loyalty only goes so far if you are in business - and why are we in business - to make money - .

I've seen this go the other way just as often. We have clients who get charged a premium because their files suck. They really, really suck. Everything comes in as Quark without the fonts, colors are spec'd in company-specific names, rather than pantone values, etc. These guys have been ordering for years and continue to do so, despite hundreds of companies between here and there (we're in Salt Lake, they're in Jersey and NYC) that could and would do it for less, because they know that we produce consistent quality regardless of the crap they send us.

We're not the highest volume production house. We're not the lowest cost. But our top paying customers are loyal because they know what to expect here and we don't let them down.

Our customers that make up the bottom 20% or so come and go. They're the bottom dwellers that don't know what quality service is, or aren't willing to pay for it, and are likely not supplying it.

Loyalty plays a very big part in some business models. High volume low margin (ala Walmart) is not such a model. But just because they aren't loyal doesn't mean that loyalty doesn't exist anymore.

I think the assessment in the first couple posts here is quite accurate: We'll see Intel chips until Intel (say that 10x fast) fails to produce a competitive product.


- Jon

It occurs to me that we display the same loyalty with our own suppliers. We buy the same substrates from the same distributors even as prices fluctuate. We don't jump online every week to see if someone can get us a 10 cent price break, because we know the quality we can expect from our current suppliers.

But when, as happened recently, that quality starts to decay we look around, see what else is available, then communicate to our supplier how easy it would be for us to move on if they don't get their act together. And if they still let us down then the two-way loyalty has been broken and we move on.

The recent example involved a substrate that began, on recent shipments, to produce wildly different color on opposing sides, where it used to be very consistent. Color has to match so that supplier had to go. We didn't stab anyone in the back, we just did what was necessary to maintain the same loyalty to our customers that they give us.


- Jon