Apple and Intel
June 8th, 2005 by admin
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p>Well, I like to think Apple knows what they’re doing and this shift to Intel chips was made because it was neccesary. Still, it’s going to be a painful transition – and I’m not sure what they see happening to the millions of PowerPC Macs that currently exist and will remain useful for the forseeable future.
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p>As far as IRAF goes, I’m still waiting to hear from someone at NOAO as to what they think. It seems that since Darwin has run on x86 from the beginning, IRAF should compile on an Intel-based Mac very easily. So, let us hope that is the case.
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p>I’m not sure the advantages of this switch really outweight the difficulties the change will cause, but I just have to hope that Steve Jobs and his team over at Apple saw something on the horizon that just wouldn’t allow Apple to stay competitive using PowerPC chips. We certainly all watched and waited for 3 GHz G5 chips and nothing. No G5 laptop in sight. So, we’ll just have to see.
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p>The Macintosh is the computer of choice for most of us because of the excellent OS X operating system, useful applications, and well designed hardware. Presumably, these things will remain even if the CPU is no longer a PPC. I just hope they manage the transition well.
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p>68K to PowerPC. OS 9 to OS X. Apple has handled some tricky transitions pretty well. I think they can manage this one, but I’m not exactly looking forward to the bumps.
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