Reassembling the bunny

The Apple-Intel announcement makes me feel very uneasy.

My first problem with the whole affair is that Apple will now be considered a generic PC vendor. Yes, I'm fully aware that Apple hardware is very custom and specialized (as I look at my brand-new Power Mac G5), but the vast majority of people won't see it that way. Apple is now forced to compete directly with Dell, HP, etc. on specs, and based on 20 years of Macintosh price history, I suspect they won't compete very well.

The next problem is essentially the same as the first -- Apple is now a PC vendor. But so are Dell and HP, so why not just buy one of their computers and load it up with Mac OS X? Sure, Phil Schiller says

We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac.

But Apple's developer documentation says

Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware. (p. 47)

If there's no Open Firmware, that means there's either an ordinary PC BIOS, or a custom Apple bootloader ROM. I predict that people will hack Tiger onto ordinary PCs within a couple of months, which will effectively mean the end of Apple Computer. :(

Lastly, the Rosetta binary-translation system sounds cool at first, but the developer documentation has this unfortunate nugget:

Rosetta does not run the following:

• Applications built for Mac OS 8 or 9
• Code written specifically for AltiVec
• Code that inserts preferences in the System Preferences pane
• Applications that require a G4 or G5 processor
• Applications that depend on one or more kernel extensions
• Kernel extensions
• Bundled Java applications or Java applications with JNI libraries that can't be translated

(p. 67)

This excludes a lot of software. But now we know the real reason why Apple chose to release this news a year early: because if developers don't start making universal binaries right now, the transition to Intel is going to suck.