NAIAS and Apple

Anybody wanting a serious look at the NAIAS Autoshow must read the autoextremist. Out of the hundreds of cars presented at most auto shows, most are crap. None, if any, truly stand above the rest. Most are designed and built for consumers who aren't car people. You'll know which ones aren't by reading the autoextremist.

As for the rest (in case you're wondering about GM), I'll only say this: At some point there will just be a reliability perception gap between the products of GM and Toyota, and even at that point GM probably won't be saved. I think that point in time is now (with a lack of design). This is an amazing company with an amazing amount of challenges ahead. I don't think it goes banktrupt though, and if it does, it restructures minimally.

I need atleast one car picture, and I'm borrowing from another good 'car' blog, and it's this:


The Bugatti Veyron which is made out of pure unobtanium, which is to say $1.2 million. It's actual cost is supposedly $5 million. The indicator stalks are $4k each! (from BBC Top Gear). VW had to have been crazy to sell it at such a loss (again from Top Gear), no wonder they're only making 300 of them. It will run through it's 25 gallon gas tank in 12 mins. at it's top speed of 253 MPH. You can let a McLaren F1 go from still to 120 MPH and beat it to 200 MPH with this. They had a 4 door version a while ago in prototype, I think, and called it the Chiron. Right...

I also saw parts of Apple's Macworld. The commercial which will be aired to let people know about the IBM -> Intel shift is at the end.

I don't care about 'What's an Intel chip doing inside a Mac?', what I do want to know is 'When will Apple replace OS X with Windows?' I should know better than to ask that question, because even as a PC user, I always had respect for Apple. I never bought one because their hardware cost twice as much as a PC, but I knew why. The IBM POWER architecture used in Mac's was better than a PC's Intel x86 architecture by design. Intel's x86 is archaic, in every sense of the word, which lives on only because of the amount of software that runs on it.

By moving away from the POWER architecture, Apple is left with OS X as it's only differentiating feature. Honestly, the developers seem to be going along with it, and the users probably won't notice. In my mind though, the price premium Apple wanted just cannot be justified anymore (The MacBook is a $700 Dell with OS X for $2000!). This is just a pathetic attempt at increasing Apple's profit margin and bottom-line by moving to much cheaper commoditized Intel hardware. As for OS X, I'm way beyond fancy GUI's. Linux and CLI is where it's at!

The ironic thing is that the Microsoft's XBOX 360 has an IBM designed POWER-based processor. So does the Sony PS3. Which just goes to show that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the POWER architecture. Here are two stories which do something I'll probably never do as a soon-to-be Computer Engineer. Explain things in plain English.

Maybe I do stand corrected, but not really, smaller die-size or not, I'd still bet Intel's hardware is cheaper, Apple's got to be reaping the x86 market's economies of scale. Making me not want to pay their price premium. Let's not forget Intel has marketshare-increasing monopolistic tendencies. Now that my AMD bias is out of the way, I'll confess my AMD bias.