Duality

Every so often, Apple will remind you that it is run by humans by making a cool product with an awful-sounding name. Joining the “Extremes” (Airport and Quartz) and Apple’s endless fascination with “i” (come on, you know they’re taking it too far) is the MacBook Pro. Unlike the other cases, though, I think this is the first time Apple has rebranded a product with a name as cool as “PowerBook” with a name as bad as “MacBook Pro.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s an awesome product. Dual-core Yonah CPU, PCI-e, DDR2 RAM, SATA hard drives, lithium polymer battery (unknown battery life, however), built-in iSight, a thinner profile, and the possibility of dual-booting or virtualizing Windows (GTA2!). I certainly wouldn’t mind having one in my possession. But the name! “MacBook Pro” sends shivers down my spine (in a bad way).

Apple dumps IBM for Intel.

The scary part about this decision is that it does make some business sense, given that Apple has laid the groundwork for transitioning current software to the new hardware. Let’s face it—the PowerPC 970 (aka G5) was slapped together. IBM didn’t devote the necessary resources then, why now? IBM is designing the CPUs for all three next-gen consoles. It has no need to deal with Apple anymore. Also, Apple could piggyback off of Intel’s motherboard designs. In this age where your GPU is as important as your CPU, wouldn’t it be nice to have PCI-Express?

Intel must have made the deal really sweet for Apple because it’s widely known that AMD CPUs are currently faster than Intel’s. I hope Apple doesn’t use the Pentium 4 or a CPU with a similar architecture. Among CS/EE academia, the Pentium 4 is the biggest joke.

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Edit: I’ve thought about it more. It makes a lot of business sense, actually. In the keynote, Jobs said that they have been maintaining an X86 port of Mac OS X for 5 years. 5 years ago, Motorola was struggling to improve the G4; now IBM is letting the G5 languish. These stalls in performance are definitely hurting Apple’s image.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Disney has now bought Pixar. This currently makes Steve Jobs Disney’s largest stockholder. And since Disney owns everything Steve Jobs is now in control of everything. Looks like he’s finally made it to the top. Congrats Stevie. But the question now is will the company be named Pixney or Disnar? Intiguing…