Dan Gillmor has a fairly complete collection of links concerning this hot rumor.
The only thing I can think of about this that might suck mightily is if there’s any truth whatsoever to the rumors (as cited by Leander Kahney here) that Intel’s new chips have built in DRM (digital restrictions management), allowing the entertainment industry to control your machine from afar through the hardware and slap you down if you do anything they don’t approve of with your content. (This would be the equivalent of if the TV and movie studios had got the TV manufacturers to make TVs that radioed the police if you tried to hook them up to a VCR.)
If that whole business, which is just an annoyance in iTunes, became the whole raison d’être of the Mac platform, I could see myself running unhappily back to Linux. I wouldn’t like it. But I wouldn’t like Macs anymore if they went too far in that direction. Maybe if Debian/Sarge turned out to be sweet I’d be a Debian boy again.
But then, as I mentioned to Michael, I’m not mostly here on a Mac because of Apple. I’m here because of the cool stuff the community does with the Mac. If the Mac community offers me as much grooviness as it does now, I’ll probably still be around.
UPDATE: it’s true. News all over. Huh. Not so strange. Probably little or nothing to do with DRM. Just fast chips arriving on a reasonable schedule. Sounds like the transition will be no big deal compared to 680×0->PowerPC or OS9->OSX.
And yet it leaves me strangely sad and dissatisfied, for no rational reason, and pining for Linux. Maybe that’s just me still being bitter about getting all into JACK and having it sucked away from me by Tiger. I dunno. I’m just kinda “eh” about macs for the moment.
I’m really hoping this is just a rumor – the PowerPC / RISC chipset *is* really a good platform. Anandtech.com has some really good G5 vs. other platform comparisons:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436
And it finally seems like the PPC platform is catching on – most of the game consoles run on PPC chips (including the XBox, which was actually running on a dual G5 machine at the MS Comdex demo) so it seems like IBM will have some decent mony to spend on developing it.
However, the largest reason for jumping the PPC ship is sitting right in front of me – my 1Ghz Powerbook is only slightly slower then the most recent Powerbooks. G4’s just don’t go much faster and they can’t seem to shoe horn a G5 into a box this size without creating an AL puddle.
whatever and ever.
Well, I find myself in the OPPOSITE camp. I’m a Linux user, pining for Mac. I was about to go by a shiny G4 eMac at the local computer store, until the Intel Mac announcement, at which point, I thought, great, that’s my sense of geek timing coming in again. You buy a $500 DVD burner, and a year later, a better drive costs $50. You buy an eMac 1.4 ghz G4 in 2005, and in 2006 there will be an eMac dual-core 4 ghz intel box going for a few less bucks, better video card, bigger hard drive, and more ram. Oh well.
And I love Debian, I use it on my primary home PC (a laptop), and I’m a Windoze software developer all day at work. So, I need a break. I thought maybe Mac was it. Maybe it still is. Just can’t figure out how to jump in.
UltraCrepidarian {Warren}
I think a lot of people are having that “should I even bother buying a PowerPC?” thing.
I can see wanting to come home from Windoze to something different, and Linux working for that. I used to use Linux at home and various different things including Windows at work — but then I got a job where I administered Linux at work, and coming home to more Linux wasn’t fun anymore. I started to see a lot of cool things going on in the Mac world and soon I had a Mac. I’ve been there since.
I did use Debian at home before I got Macs, and Ubuntu. Both great distros; though I was starting to think Debian would *never* release Sarge.