‘Insider’ Apple Info? Nah, Not Really
Posted July 10th, 2005 @ 09:30pm by Erik J. Barzeski
This piece at Ars is entertaining, but it falls well short of its billing:
If you've been following the Apple-to-Intel transition, you're going to want to read this whole article. Why? Because I'm going to do something that I almost never do: spill insider information from unnamed sources that I can confirm are in a position to know the score.
Yeah, that doesn't happen, and if you check out the message boards you'll see several other people notice this as well.
Donate Life
Posted 10 Jul 2005 at 10:24pm #
Those who speak, don't know.
Those who know, don't speak.
Story of my job.
Posted 10 Jul 2005 at 10:27pm #
What has happened to Ars since the Intel announcement? They have gone completely flaky, usually they seem so sensible. The article you point to barely has internal logic, much less relation to the real world. The "insiders", never named, seem to be disgruntled Motorola and IBM sales reps or such from what I can tell.
The meat of the Ars piece is that Apple would sit on an order, waiting for the price to go down. That is, they would lose potential sales today, just so they could get chips for cheap tomorrow, in "never enough" quantities.
The closest real world support of this theory was probably around in the Motorola days, when you would sometimes see 3rd party CPU upgrade kits for mac, in speeds faster than what was shipping that did not appear to be taking advantage of a lull between Mac Models or parts surplus.
Supply and demand was at play then, but how exactly. You know the upgrade kits were not needing CPUs in the quantities of a typical Mac launch.
What sort of company sells smaller quantity orders to their largest customers competitors, while postponing the order of the largest customer for that product?
I think that other theories can explain the chip trickle as well or better, and be every bit as weak. Such as IBM hoping to sell their own Power Blades, with an expensive service contract, to customers that bought low maintenance "service" package Xserves instead. Or Motorola still caught up in a antiquated love for the embedded market and loss of clones hissy fit.
Apple may not be without blame, but to put all of the blame on their behavior as a customer, is someone saying "sour grapes."
And if I were Apple, I would keep all options open as far as suppliers, while celebrating a supplier that apparently wants its business, because the business they are in has become a commodity market.
I think Apple merely wanted to nudge everyone to code in Cocoa already, so they COULD actually go through with cross platform plans, be it for a handheld, a multicore workstation or whatever.
Do you think the 64 bit road map for OS X is abandoned, as some do? I think the developer macintel is p4 merely to keep a bargain Mac in the line, forcing code to work on at least that minimum -- that will not be the median, or top of the intel macs line, rather the bottom. Also, I think they realize Altivec needs of code might be better off shunted to a dedicated GPU that they user can upgrade as they need.