*WEDDING.BLOG.LINK*

It seems that among the people that I've had contact with in since the big Apple+Intel announcement there is confusion about what it is I'm really upset about.

And, truth be told, I'm not really upset - I think Apple will be fine, the machines will be fine, PowerPC will be supported for years and years thanks to Rosetta and to Universal Binaries... I probably won't even notice a difference.

Nonetheless there is still that air of disappointment in the air around me, even now at two days later

The great John Siracusa from Ars Technica put together a great article yesterday going over what this all means to the Macintosh community. Here's an excerpt from that article that, I think, accurately describes what everyone who has been with the Mac for any amount of time really feels about this:

A broken heart

Despite all the interesting possibilities for the future (which I'll get to in a bit), I'm saddened by this turn of events. Everything that was captivating and exotic about Apple's CPUs added up to little more than a few brief moments of glory in the market and a handful of trips to the top of the performance heap. But to silicon-loving geeks, it really meant something.

Many a "PC weenie" has been won over to the Mac side by the allure of strange, new hardware. For CPU geeks, its the same. Look no further than our own Hannibal whose slow ascent to PowerBook glory was guided by a fascination with AltiVec, plentiful registers, and an orthogonal ISA. Sure, x86 has the market-share and usually the speed, but is it elegant? Does it turn the CPU geek knobs all the way to 11? Is it sexy? No, not really. In fact, it's pretty darned ugly.

Yes, this all sounds silly, but it's a real phenomenon. Right or wrong, sensible or not, this is how a lot of people feel about PowerPC vs. x86 (or 68K vs. x86, for that matter). I'm one of the biggest x86 haters. I've often argued that the collective human effort spent making fast implementations of the bass-ackwards x86 ISA would be much better spent elsewhere. Oh, I fully realize the market realities that conspire to make all of this x86 effort worthwhile, but this is about emotion, not reason. And if I didn't give significant weight to my feelings when it comes to my platform choice, would I really have been a Mac user for the past 21 years?

So yeah, I'm sad that the PowerPC is be leaving the Mac platform—even more so because of the really interesting things going on with that ISA in the upcoming crop of game console CPUs. It will pain me to know the contortions that instructions are going through in an x86 CPU inside a Mac. I will miss the idea of AltiVec, and the promise of powerful new CPUs arriving "out of nowhere" to power new Macs, a la the G5. I'll miss the interesting things that "only Macs can do" thanks to clever CPU features like AltiVec, or even just a particularly fast barrel shifter. I'll miss the dream, even if it was always destined to be just that.