Mac OS X is a winner, but Apple is hamstrung by slow chips and a
1970s business model.
There is an 80% probability that Apple Computer will switch to
using Intel chips within two to four years, according to Andrew
Neff, an analyst at Bear Stearns. It sounds unlikely, but Neff
predicted Hewlett-Packard buying Compaq, which is perhaps even more
insane.
Apple's problem is that it is stuck with a lame-duck microprocessor
supplied by Motorola - a troubled company that has shed about
50,000 staff in the past two years. Risc (reduced instruction set
computer) chips were supposed to thrash boring antiques such as
Intel's x86 range, but as the Pentium 4 races towards 4GHz, even
the most fervent Macintosh supporters have noticed that the Power
PC is falling further and further behind. The huge gulf in both
clock speed and real world performance - according to independent
tests - has reached the point where Apple has to ship
dual-processor machines as standard just to stay in the race.
Switching is not impossible: Apple has done it before. Rather than
stick to one boring instruction set, it has already tried Mostek
6502, Motorola 68000 and IBM Power PC processors, with a side order
of ARM chips.
And when it finally kills off its lame-duck operating system, Mac
OS, there will be even less reason to stick to its chips. Mac OS X,
formerly known as Nextstep, with its BSD Unix core and Mach
operating system, is inherently cross-platform, and Next did an
Intel port before it (in effect) took over Apple Computer.
What stands in the way is Apple's 1970s-style minicomputer business
model. It makes its margins by maximum lock-in, with the ideal
customer buying a Mac with all-Apple software and Apple peripherals
from an Apple-owned store. Giving its users a choice would lead to
the rapid death of the proprietary hardware business on which its
survival depends.
Of course, Apple could simply suppress the Intel code it must have
in its labs the same way it suppressed its Star Trek x86 port of
Mac OS. But there is another way. A large computer manufacturer
could simply buy Apple and close it down.
Several companies, including IBM and Sun Microsystems, have already
declined Apple's attempts to get itself taken over, but that was
before Mac OS X, with its Unix capabilities, shipped. Now a buyer
would no longer have to support an expensive hardware operation: it
could just stick a proprietary Mac Rom in a cheap PC.
And if a big PC company owned Mac OS X it could do what Apple
cannot: it could license it cheaply to all comers, and give
Microsoft a real run for its money.
Jack Schofield is computer editor at the Guardian