It’s five years, give or take a few weeks, since Apple first shipped Macs with Intel processors. The transition to Intel, which was hugely controversial when Steve Jobs first announced it at WWDC in 2005, was remarkably smooth and, in retrospect, probably the only move Apple could have made in order to carry on making computers.
The first Macs to ship with Intel processors were the newly named MacBook Pros, the successor to the PowerPC-driven PowerBooks. So the launch of the latest set of MacBook Pros is a good time to reflect on just what the move to Intel has done for Apple over the last half decade.
The most notable feature of these new Apple notebooks is Thunderbolt, the new name for what we used to call Light Peak. Light Peak was developed by Intel as a successor to USB, FireWire and PCI Express, and was also designed to carry video signals. It’s a hugely impressive piece of engineering that brings all sorts of benefits, particularly to portable computers, which can now connect to the kind of peripherals that demand fast transfer speeds and were previously only able to connect to desktop machines with PCI Express cards. It will also, eventually, simplify connection interfaces and make it easier to connect hard drives, displays and dozens of other peripherals to your Mac.
While Apple may well still have introduced Thunderbolt if it had chosen, say, AMD instead of Intel for its processors, there’s no doubt its close relationship with the latter has allowed it to influence the design of Thunderbolt and be the first computer manufacturer to support it.
That relationship with Intel also enabled Apple to be among the first manufacturers to ship portable computers featuring Intel’s Sandy Bridge, marketed as Core i5 and Core i7, processors. Sandy Bridge chips are faster and generate less heat than previous Core i processors, and will be used in laptops from most of the biggest manufacturers in 2011.
This is a far cry from where Apple was a few years ago, when it struggled to keep up with performance improvements in both desktop and portable computers from PC manufacturers. The reason it eventually gave up on PowerPC was precisely because neither IBM nor Motorola could come up with a chip design that would run fast enough to keep up with Intel while staying cool enough to use in a desktop Mac, never mind a laptop. When Apple launched the Power Mac G5 in 2003, it promised to have G5 processors running at 3GHz by the following summer. By the time it switched to Intel in January 2006, those chips still hadn’t materialised. The G5 never made it into a PowerBook due to its inability to dissipate heat, and consequently Apple’s notebooks were in danger of becoming a laughing stock.
Five years on, sales of Apple laptops have rocketed. In the Christmas quarter of 2005, the last batch of PowerBooks and iBooks between them sold fewer than 600,000 units. According to figures in the DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report, Apple sold 10.2 million notebooks and iPads in the same quarter last year. Apple says it sold 7.33 million iPads in that quarter. That leaves sales of MacBooks and MacBook Pros at 2.87 million, which represents 378% growth in five years.
According to DisplaySearch, that figure of 10.2 million mobile devices made Apple the biggest mobile PC vendor in the world, overtaking HP. That may change again this year – HP doesn’t have any presence in the tablet market at the moment, but its TouchPad, due later in the year, could give the iPad a run for its money – but for the moment, Apple is numero uno. And the laptop sector is by far the most important part of the PC market at the moment.
One of the other benefits of the move to Intel is that Macs can now run any operating system that can be run on an Intel PC, including Windows and various flavours of Linux. By contrast, Apple, being a hardware as well as a software maker, has the luxury of choosing not to allow Mac OS X to be installed on Wintel machines. That’s not only convenient for us Mac users, but has helped attract huge numbers of PC users to the Mac.
Now that Microsoft has announced that the next version of Windows will be designed to run on rival Arm processors, the relationship with Apple is even more valuable to Intel. And where the Cupertino firm may once have been a junior partner in that relationship, that’s no longer the case.
The two companies may have regarded themselves as arch-enemies a dozen or so years ago, when Apple mocked the Pentium with images of snails and toasted Intel bunnies, but as partners they’re far more formidable than they were as rivals. And that’s something for which we, as Mac users, should be very thankful.
Kenny Hemphill
