John Moltz Disclaimer: I’m told I’m somewhat disappointing in person.

APPLE IS DOOMED! DOOOOOMED! END COMMUNICATION.

Wow, I just read Jerry Kindall’s doomsday scenario (link via Backup Brain) and I’m a bit surprised at him.

First off, Apple could simply say “We don’t support WINE. If you’re using WINE, don’t call us for support. Because we don’t support it. No support. As for support, we’re fresh out of it. For you, anyway, because you’re using WINE.” It’s already said everyone has to use Xcode, so it doesn’t seem like such a leap.

Looking over the 38 apps in my dock, I see eight that are cross-platform. One is iTunes. Then there’s Firefox, AbiWord and NeoOfficeJ – all open-source. Two are games. The other two are Quicken and Photoshop Elements. So just four out of 38 are ports from Windows (actually, I’m not sure about Quicken, but I assume so), two of which have their own interface anyway.

Now, the whole point of the Macintosh is that “good enough” is not, in fact, good enough. Yes, some of the open-source apps I use are, shall we say, compromised in terms of their interface, but that has more to do with my utter refusal to send money to Microsoft than it has to do with cost or convenience.

Even if I’m forced to use an app or a few apps that don’t have a spectacular interface, that doesn’t mean I want to use a crappy interface when I’m doing system chores. Or anything else, for that matter. It doesn’t mean I want to live without Exposé, Dashboard or Spotlight, let alone iPhoto, iMovie or the Finder.

Assuming I do almost all of my daily work in the 38 applications in my Dock, why would I let the lazy asses who program for 5.3% of my computing experience dictate the other 96.7%?

And why would I ditch OS X for an operating system beset with malware? It doesn’t make any sense.

Developers came back to Apple for OS X and sex-ay, sex-ay hardware. Well, the hardware just got faster.

Not scared. Kind of happy.

i think it’s a good move on apple’s part. using chips that seem to have the potential to be faster and cooler is, how do you americans say, “a good thing.”

Longhorn could scrub my toilets for me and i still wouldn’t switch to a Windows environment. OS X is stunning. it was a risky but great move to abandon OS 9 and i feel the same way about leaving the Power PC chip behind. call me greedy, but i want my powerbook to be faster and preferably not cause second degree burns.

I’m pretty squarely in the Apple is Doomed camp, sadly.

I knew Jerry Kindall years ago in the BBS world here in Columbus, Ohio. We were Apple II users at the time. I realized the Apple II was a dead end when Apple held an event they called “Apple II Forever.” It was an eye opener. Before Apple swore undying loyalty to customers like me, I thought there was a future for the Apple II family. The tenor of the marketing-speak made it clear there was not.

Jerry’s thesis — that software vendors will abandon Mac development because their Windows software, running in some compatibility mode on Pentium-based Macs, will be “good enough” — was something I hadn’t considered. It might not be true for all vendors, but it will certainly be true for some.

Your judgment that “good enough” isn’t good enough won’t matter much if Adobe, et al., decide that it is, and drops development of Mac-specific versions of their software. I know Adobe promised ongoing support at the keynote. I’ve heard promises before. They are comprised of hot air.

Whether Apple supports WINE is irrelevant. If Apple goes out of its way to deliberately cripple WINE — well, they wouldn’t be much better than Microsoft, and they would probably fail anyway.

I’ve heard about the Osborne effect: announce that you will ship something better, and you kill off sales of everything that’s currently available, and possibly kill your own company. Normally, that effect is somewhat muted by the fact that we’ve all learned there’s always something newer and cooler coming Real Soon Now. Still, Apple has tried to announce new and improved hardware as close as possible to the actual ship date. When they’ve missed planned ship dates, sales have suffered.

But this time we’ve been set up for a super-magnified Osborne effect. The first Pentium-based Macs won’t ship for a year. The entire line won’t be converted until two and a half years from now. That’s an awfully long time to suffer depressed sales.

How depressed will those sales be? Well, if you buy a PPC Mac today, you’re investing in a platform that Apple has already abandoned. Normally, the software you buy today will run even better when you eventually upgrade your hardware. But now, any software you buy for your PPC-based Mac will run LESS well in emulation mode when you buy a Pentium-based Mac. Jobs’ emulator demos were very underwhelming, performance-wise. Any software tuned for performance by using Altivec or G4 or G5-specific code won’t run at all. You’ll certainly pay, in cash or performance, when you move “up” to a next-generation Mac.

Usually, after a lot of doom-saying like this, I add, “But I hope I’m wrong.” This time I’m not so sure. There is some reason to believe that Apple is moving to Intel chips in order to gain DRM features. Microsoft’s commitment to DRM everywhere is one reason I wouldn’t run Windows XP if Microsoft paid me. If Apple has joined the effort to lock everything down, their doom doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me.

I need to look into this interesting thing called Linux.

Define “abandoned”.

Xcode compiles two binaries – one for PowerPC, one for Intel. I don’t have the time to wade through the documentation tonight, but I believe it’s not even either or. It’s both, if you want Intel. So, until Apple alters Xcode, stuff compiled for Macs will run on both PowerPC and Intel.

So the issue solely revolves around code that’s not re-written for Intel. This is familiar territory as I went through the PowerPC migration and I can tell you that the thing that everyone was complaining about was *not* applications – those all came along relatively quickly.

It was the OS. It was pieces of the OS that Apple dragged its feet on rewriting for the PowerPC. That’s not an issue here as they already have an entirely Intel version.

Yes, this move is not going to happen overnight, so it’s a little early to complain about Rosetta’s speed. 10.0’s speed on the PowerPC sucked pretty badly too, but it kept getting better and better.

There are always transition pains. But Kindall’s main point was not about performance, it was about WINE subverting the Mac OS.

First, the Mac OS is better and people will want to use it, not an inferior OS that’s prone to viruses and spyware. Second, Apple controls the whole user experience, unlike Microsoft. For the same reason you can’t run the Mac OS on some crappy hardware and expect the Mac experience, you can’t run Windows on a Mac and expect it either.

This is the same old argument that Windows and the Mac just aren’t different anymore. Well, yeah, for 95% of the world that may be true, but for a more discerning 5% (or whatever) it’s not.

And finally, let me just point out that nobody *has* to code for the Mac now, yet they do. Unless Apple for some reason makes WINE easy on the Mac (and why would they?), it will just be another configuration hassle that no one wants to deal with. How many people choose to run applications through X11? A small minority of geeks. Is running OpenOffice and GIMP making Microsoft stop developing Office for the Mac or Adobe stop developing Photoshop for the Mac?

Go ahead and look at Linux. You can look for as long as you want and you won’t find a desktop as good as that on the Mac. And not on Windows either.

Since Monday’s announcement, I’ve been predicting that Apple is doomed. And I’ve tried to persuade people that my prediction is correct. I apologize for doing that. It was a mistake.

If I persuade someone I’m right, and I turn out to be wrong, then I’ve made them unhappy and possibly led them to bad decisions. Even if my prediction turns out to be correct, I don’t see any virtuous result of persuading anyone of that right now.

Time will tell.

If, a year or two from now, there is no Macintosh, or if the Mac has joined Windows as a fully locked-down environment, consider turning your back on DRM Everywhere. I hope that’s my irrational paranoia speaking. I’d like to stick with Macintosh. I’ll go rough it with the Linux hippies only if that’s what I must do to have control of my own computer. But I will check out the lay of the land before my hand is forced.

P.S.: What I meant when I said “abandoned” was “relegated to second-class support.” I foresee (uh oh, predictions again!) two ways that will manifest itself:

New versions of Mac OS X are packed with useful features, tailored in part to sell new hardware. I expect that OS X 10.5, due in about 18 months, will have some sought-after feature that only works on Pentium-based Macs (if there are any).

I used to use a new computer for four or five years. I believe that a brand-new Macintosh bought today will not run the current version of OS X five years from today.

Again, time will tell.

A few more points about this subject.

Kindall makes an assumption that has rarely proved true in the past – that lazy developers can dictate what users will get, rather than the other way around.

Witness the example of Word 6.0. Microsoft tried to unify the code base between the Mac and Windows and created the crappiest version of Word ever. Did users dumbly upgrade and suffer through a slow, bloated application? No. Most of them just stuck with Word 5. Why drop hundreds of dollars on an upgrade that you’re only going to hate?

Similarly, why would a Mac user upgrade to a version of Word or Photoshop that looks like Windows? All they have to do is produce one version for OS X on Intel for users to be able to apply some pressure.

Yes, either company could just decide they want to get out of the Mac market, but if they want to do that, why haven’t they already? Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit supposedly does very well for the company so why would they fuck with a good thing?

Lastly, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m anti-Linux. I’m not. I think Linux is great, but it’s not a desktop OS of the caliber of the Mac. It’s way more configurable and it’s great for geeks, but it’s just not the same thing. It is so not married to the hardware in the way the Mac is.

[...] Since Monday, when Apple announced it will switch the CPUs in their Macintosh computers from the current PowerPCs to Intel Pentium-type chips, I have wandered the highways and byways of the internet, sharing my view that the move dooms the Macintosh, and explaining why I think so. [...]