I’m sure you’ve read a liner or two about Apple’s move to Intel. It’s been all over the media and it’s hard NOT to speculate about it, when one is a long and full-time consumer of the technology. I’m hoping people care about this, because it will have an impact on what and how we’ll end up computing for a living, and on how our ‘digital’ lives will be shaped in the future.
As a news event, it may be insignificant now, nonetheless, one fact is undeniable: it appears it’ll be increasingly difficult for us, mere mortals, to escape from the ramifications of how new technologies evolve and impact our everyday lives.
It appears Steve Jobs wants Apple NOT to remain a marginal player in the PC desktop/laptop space, after all. Having said that, don’t think I’m re-stating the obvious, because if you’ve been following Apple’s trajectory for the past few years, you’ll know it’s not such an obvious deduction to make. Apple’s moves and counter-moves with its product line have both disoriented and frustrated many in the forecasting game.
A few analysts have said it’s been Job’s goal since he returned to Apple in 1997 to recapture some of that market-share lost to Microsoft in the 90′s. They also point out, it’s been his long term strategy for Mac OS X to eventually recapture the desktop and laptop market space through ‘innovation’. If this assumptions are proven correct, it’s likely that before too long, we’ll see Mac OS X running on hardware systems not designed or built by Apple.
Impossible, you say? May be, but frankly, if there was a time when such a far-fetched idea seemed possible, it may well be now. Why?
- It’s the right time for Apple: Longhorn is very quickly becoming the ever-missing / feature-deprived operating system of the decade. That’s what consumers get when one company holds captive 80% of the desktop market: glorified face-lifts to the expense of real innovation.
- Mac OS X is a considerably superior operating system in several regards (one being its unexpected robustness as an enterprise-class OS) almost 1 and 1/2 years before Longhorn hits the stores.
- The PowerPC chip development roadmap didn’t meet Apple needs for the type of systems it wants to introduce in the next few years (portables were a major concern), compounded with very questionable mass production output from its suppliers. Enter here: Intel. (Nothing against Intel, but I would’ve preferred AMD)
Apple denies any plans to deploy its OS X onto beige Intel boxes, and that’s fine. Apple needs time to give itself the head start it needs to ramp up its Intel box production, and to prepare developers to enter the wider x86 world. Until Apple has readied its own x86 offerings, it needs the promise that only Apple hardware will run the flashy and cool OS X to keep people from buying boxes from Dell or other vendors that are already ramped up to produce rival systems.
Jason Brooks predicts that, shortly after the completion of Apple’s big move, the company will deliver OS X Unbound, a version of its excellent and innovative operating system that’ll join Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS X’s own BSD cousins in offering users the option of running the OS they’ve acquired on the hardware they choose. In fact, he believes (and maybe there’ll be a magic Steve Jobs keynote moment in our future to confirm it) that this has been the Apple co-founder’s aim ever since he returned to the company’s helm.
Jobs knows that Apple will never wrest away a significant chunk of Microsoft’s Windows market share as long as OS X remains tied exclusively to Apple hardware. For the longer term, however, Steve & Co. are too smart to allow protectionist attitudes toward one part of their product line to retard sales of another, that’s the sort of “strategy” that prevented a Sony too focused on shielding its content properties from the digital age from delivering consumers a worthy, MP3-playing heir to the Walkman, thereby leaving open the door to the now-dominant iPod.
Perhaps second to the iPod, OS X is Apple’s hottest commodity, and millions await the chance to pay Apple $130 every year and a half for it. Now that OS X is queued up to launch on x86, The Steve is way too smart to clip its wings, Jason Brooks guarantees it, and I do too.
