The weather's absolutely beautiful here in San Francisco but I blew the entire weekend in front of the computer (again) trying to figure out Apple's purported move to Intel.
At first, it was just too hard to believe, and I dismissed it as nonsense, but two serious news organizations are reporting it as a done deal (News.com and WSJ), and on Sunday morning a couple of things fell into place making it look a lot more plausible.
I guess Apple will move to Intel, and they're relying on a fast, seamless emulator to do it.
But it's really about Hollywood: Apple's looking to transform the movie industry the same way the iPod and iTunes changed the music business.
As initially reported, there are a couple of big problems with Apple moving to Intel. The biggest is shifting all the Mac software to a new platform. Apple apparently mulled moving to Intel a few years ago, when Motorola's chip development fell woefully behind, but Steve Jobs nixed it because of the massive disruption it would cause developers.
What's new this time is a fast, transparent, universal emulator from Transitive, a Silicon Valley startup.
Transitive's QuickTransit allows any software to run on any hardware with no performance hit, or so the company claims. The techology automatically kicks in when necessary, and supports high-end 3D graphics. It was developed by Alasdair Rawsthorne.
When I wrote about the software for Wired News last fall, the company had PowerBooks and Windows laptops running Linux software, including Quake III, with no performance lag whatsoever.
If Apple has licensed QuickTransit for an Intel-powered Mac, all current applications should just work, no user or developer intervention required.
Programmers could port their software to the new platform slowly and steadily, and the shift would be as relatively painless as the recent move from OS 9 to OS X, which, of course, relied on emulation in the Classic environment.
But why would Apple do this? Because Apple wants Intel's new Pentium D chips.
Released just few days ago, the dual-core chips include a hardware copy protection scheme that prevents "unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard," according to PC World.
Apple -- or rather, Hollywood -- wants the Pentium D to secure an online movie store (iFlicks if you will), that will allow consumers to buy or rent new movies on demand, over the internet.
According to News.com, the Intel transition will occur first in the summer with the Mac mini, which I'll bet will become a mini-Tivo-cum-home-server.
Hooked to the internet, it will allow movies to be ordered and stored, and if this News.com piece is correct, loaded onto the video iPod that's in the works.
Intel's DRM scheme has been kept under wraps -- to prevent giving clues to crackers -- but the company has said it will allow content to be moved around a home network, and onto suitably-equipped portable devices.
And that's why the whole Mac platform has to shift to Intel. Consumers will want to move content from one device to another -- or one computer to another -- and Intel's DRM scheme will keep it all nicely locked down.
Presumably, Jobs used his Pixar moxie to persuade Hollywood to get onboard, and they did so because the Mac platform is seen as small and isolated -- just as it was when the record labels first licensed music to iTunes. The new Mac/Intel platform will be a relatively isolated test bed for the digital distribution of movies and video.
Will current Mac users like this new locked-down platform? I doubt it, which I guess is why it's going into consumer devices first.
In the PC industry, Apple lost the productivity/office era to Microsoft, but it's trying to get the jump on the next big thing: the entertainment/creativity era, and it's going to drag it users, even if they're kicking and screaming, with it.
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