Yet another interesting IT committee meeting today.We had a representative from Apple in to discuss the goings on and the future direction for Apple and Intel Patrick Dennard was available to answer questions.

Timeline and strategy moving forward:
As the whole world now knows by now, Steve Jobs announced at the latest Word Wide Developers Conference that Apple is switching from the PowerPC chip to an Intel chip.
Why switch to Intel? The quick answer is that Apple had issues with IBM’s production cycle and missed release deadlines because the chips were not ready. Patrick told us that apple was convinced that the future roadmap laid out by Intel would allow Apple to continue to increase its functionality and processor speed and meet its production goals.

Apple’s plan is to roll out the Intel processors to the consumer first in 2006 (Mac Mini and iMac etc.) and then to the G5 Desktops (or what ever they will call them then) in 2007 soon to be followed by XServe. There are no definitive answers as of yet, but the general consensus is that Apple will be using some sort of 64 bit chip (though probably not Itanium). Patrick told us that apple has been running OS X on Intel processors essentially since the initial release so that the OS is essentially ready for prime time. The decision to make the announcement 2 years early was to give time for the developers to port their apps over to the new platform. Apple has an app called Rosetta that will translate the PPC application binaries to run on the new Intel platform. According to Patrick, there will be a ‘slight’ lag time in starting up the applications through Rosetta, but from what he says, he doesn’t think it will impact the performance once the application has launched. Personally I’m not too sure about this. My guess is that this is going to be a fairly processor intensive process and will degrade performance in non-native MacIntel applications.

We had quite a bit of time to ask questions and there was quite a lively discussion. I asked if he had heard of the Robert Cringely article on how the WWDC announcement is leading towards an Intel purchase of Apple. Patrick had not heard of this and brushed it off saying that there have been rumors of other takeovers from Disney and Sony etc… One committee member asked if he should wait to purchase new server hardware. Of course the answer from the SALES rep was it depends on your application and do you want to wait for 3 years to add hardware? As time goes on it will be interesting to see how Apple handles this question and also to see how it will impact overall sales. Some on the committee were anxiously awaiting the release of the G5 powerbook. Well, the answer that came back was there ISN'T going to be one. Another member asked about OS X running on non-apple x86 boxes. The answer was, it will probably be possible, but OS X will only be supported on MacIntel hardware. Another committee member said there are ALREADY hacks out there to get OS X running on non-apple hardware, so this will be inevitable as Apple migrates away from the PPC chips.

Concerns of DRM at the hardware level making it more difficult for agencies to do their job
There was quite a lengthy discussion on the concern that Intel has digital rights management built into the hardware. There was a lively debate about the legality of this with issues of copyright law and basic tenets of the constitution thrown out as reasons both for and against it. The basic concern is that hardware manufacturers can dictate the use of the installed software. I wasn’t too clear on the really strong opposition to this, but I will continue to investigate so that I can form a proper option. I look forward to continuing this discussion with my fellow committee members.

Continuing problems with SMB
I took this opportunity to vent about my issues with using SMB to connect to my windows file server. Essentially I bitched at the SMB implementation that Apple implemented (i.e. SAMBA doesn’t have these problems). Patrick tried to convince me that the solution was to switch to XServe. Well, I can tell you that isn’t happening any time soon and I am still angry that I had to invest additional funds in a 3rd party product (AdMitMac) to get SMB to work. He said he would put me in touch with a support engineer at Apple to discuss. We shall see what comes out of it.

Issues with AD integration
A few members mentioned that they had problems integrating XServe and OSX into their Active Directory environments. Although other committee members stated they had only minor problems and that essentially everything worked properly. The Apple rep said that he never recommends integrating Mac with AD without having an Apple consultant involved (not 3rd party). He said that there are 5 in the country and they charge about $1800 a day to come on site. They not only fix your integration issues, but also document all the changes and train the staff. Patrick recommended going directly to Apple for consulting because they have direct access to the system engineers to more efficiently solve any issues that may arise.

Concerns about non-responsive sales reps
No names were given, however this seemed to be a common problem among several committee members. One member said that Apple lost a $50,000 sale because of poor response from their Apple rep. Patrick mentioned that they have a renewed interest in the enterprise market and to forward the reps names so he can investigate.

Concerns about 16 month upgrade cycle and the process and cost involved for upgrades
One committee member voiced concern about the 16 month upgrade cycle for OSX for both clients and servers. He voiced frustration about both the upgrade costs and the time and effort it took to implement. Patrick said that OS X is now a much more mature product and that he has been told the upgrade cycle will not be as aggressive going forward, however he could not give us any more detail.

Concerns about Quark
Concerns about the time it took for Quark to upgrade to OSX came up. The question was asked about the next migration to MacIntel. The rep politely answered they are available to support all of their vendors, but they will NOT do the programming for them. This then launched into the discussion of the migration to Indesign. The general consensus was in many agencies there is a migration away from Quark to InDesign. InDesign is seen as a viable alternative to Quark Xpress so if Quark drops the ball again this could severely impact their install base and could be another nail in their coffin.

Recommendation to Attend WWDC:
Patrick strongly encouraged each of us to attend the next World Wide Developers Conference. He said that this is a rare opportunity to have access to the Apple engineers. One committee member seconded this and told us how he was able to talk to one Apple programmer to solve his problem.