Maximum PC

So lets start discussing some of the issues that affect developers concerning the Apple switching to x86 news. Is anyone excited about this?

i think it's good... very good. Apple has a very strong OS but it's always been hindered by the hardware. I'm sure many developers would love to have built for the mac but just couldn't see the time and energy spent to learn the PPC platform for optimizations. Running on x86 hardware means you have developers with years of experience that can now jump in head first with just the little overhead of learning the particular OS APIs. And then again OS X is really unix underneat so every *nix hacker is already pretty well versed in the core os too!

I'd say it's win win. Win for developers and then as a result win for users.

Should give Microsoft a good push to really innovate with longhorn and not just "innovate" like they always talk. Maybe they ramp up production and put back in some of the features they took out of longhorn....

That is one of the things I am wondering about. I haven't followed SSE very much since SSE1 and I'm wondering if AltiVec still isn't better. Back in the 3DNow vs SSE vs AltiVec days, AltiVec was much more general purpose and about 3x as many instructions available. I would imagine that SSE2 and SSE3 closed that gap, but I'm just not sure.



It is certainly good new for Unix developers. =)

Unfortunatly, it will also probably forever cement Linux's image as a hobbyist OS among consumers.



You hit the nail on the head - it's just talk. Obviously I don't have much faith in Redmond, not that anything they've pulled is all that revolutionary to begin with (w/ perhaps the exception of Avalon).

Looks like Apple is really on the ball....



For being the only major platform w/o Java 5 support, they seem to be emphasing Java pretty heavily...



http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/index.html

I think it's good. Time to learn Objective C!!!!
:p

Oh, don't say that.... =)

Remember, Mac OS X is based on NextStep, which is in Objective C. Apple has the Carbon API available which you can use for C++, but to dig deep into the OS you will have to learn Objective C sooner or later.

I have done a lot of cross platform development for Mac and Windows. Unless Apple has cleaned up their system documentation since I last looked at them 18 months ago (I doubt it), then you will also find yourself staring at a lot of sample code in Pascal! ARRRGH!

An Intel version of the Mac OS is nothing new. At the 1991 Apple Developers Conference, Apple had private demonstrations of their OS working on PCs--with dual screens even. I remember being very excited about it. At that time, the Mac OS wiped the floor with anything Microsoft had to offer. We never heard anything after that. When asked, Apple said the they canceled the project since they believed it would hurt their hardware sales. If Apple would have released their OS back then on Intel, it would probably have put Windows out of business.