Villagers With Pitchforks

The flaming torches were delayed in transit, sorry.

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Location: Glendale, Arizona, U.S. Outlying Islands

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Apple/Intel

So: In a couple of years I can buy an Intel box from Apple, partition the hard drive and run all of my software on the same machine. Though not all at the same time, unless one of those packages that let you run Linux and Windows at the same time get ported to the new hardware. (Hint: This would be a Good Idea.)

I think that's wonderful.

But: I'll have to buy the hardware from Apple, at their mark-up. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Especially if the Apple stores are still around and keeping to their current service levels. Key for me isn't the Apple hardware. I quit caring about hardware differences after I switched from Amiga.

Key for me is the software. OS X can theoretically run on any modern hardware. Apple says they've been running it on Intel, albeit in the closet, since day one and I believe them. I bought the Apple laptop this year because I wanted OS X and I want to program on OS X.

And Apple gives their development tools away. The development tools I downloaded for free are exactly the same as I would have got if I had paid the $500 to join their developer program at a higher level (which I will do sometime in the next six months; once I'm over the learning curve I expect to need some of the extra benefits, like the testing lab time.).

Microsoft doesn't and they should.

And OSX has just as steep a learning curve as Windows does, but in the end the code itself is easier to write.

I enjoy programming again.

In short: Apple gets it. Software rules.

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