Insufficiently Random

The lonely musings of a loosely connected software developer.

Monday, June 6, 2005

Apple better not switch to x86!

I really hope John Gruber is right in Daring Fireball: Intel-Apple Odds and Ends.

I just purchased a 15" PowerBook in late December. I was hoping it would last me the next 3-5 years.

Last time I purchased a Macintosh computer was in 1994. Apple had just introduced the PowerPC line, but I didn't have the funds for one of the new PowerMacs - so I purchased a Quadra. The Quadras were based on the 68040 processor, and were the last computers shipped by Apple using that CPU. Apple had just started the transition to a new processor platform and I got left behind from day one.

In 1997 when it was time for me to upgrade I went with an SGI O2, as SGI had been on the MIPS architecture for years and showed now signs of leaving it.

A year or so later SGI announced they were eliminating the MIPS processors from their lineup and moving to Intel processors. This didn't worked out very well for SGI, and I was stuck with a MIPS based SGI. SGI is just barely alive. I'm surprised they haven't closed their doors yet thanks to that (and other) disasters.

The SGI/Intel event prompted me to move to x86/Linux for several years.

But now I'm back on the PowerPC based Macintosh, as I just got fed up with the GUI environment on Linux not working well, and most laptop hardware is crap (when compared to Apple's current offerings).

So I guess its just about time for Apple to switch architectures on me. Again. At least I purchased Tiger.

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