The Real Meaning Of Today’s Octo-Core Iron
So Apple has announced new Mac Pros and XServes with dual quad-core Xeons.
Big whoop.
Ask any experienced Apple watcher, and they’ll tell you that Apple regularly ‘clears the decks’ in the last quarter preceding their keynote events at MWSF and the WWDC developer conference in order to make room for more important announcements at the keynote.
What could be more important than the announcement of desktop machines with more go-fast juice than the entire North American military-industrial complex circa 1987? Here’s what.
Today’s MacPro/XServe announcement means is that *some other product* has finally been cleared to be shown at MacWorld. That special something could be anything from a new piece of software up to a new computer in the form of an antigravity snowboard (frickin’ lasers optional), but whatever it is, El Jobso Himself has signed off on booting the octo-core machines from his Keynote deck.
Given that the change comes a bare week before the big show, we can make a few guesses about The Magic Thing that displaced the big iron:
It’s consumer-oriented.No divination skills required here. MacWorld is for ordinary folks. Geekware ships at WWDC.
It’s a hardware revenue driver.
Apple’s business, lest we forget, is all about the machine. Everything Apple does is aimed at driving hardware sales (and incidentally, putting another dent in the universe). The Magic Thing will inevitably involve new hardware, even if the ViziblyWhizzy™ bits are implemented in software.
It represents a true leap ahead.
Doubling the number of processor cores is great, but it’s just Moore’s Law in action. Faced with a choice between Merely Better and Surprising, Steve Jobs will always go for the surprise.
Just One More Thing.
It’s not an upgrade. It’s a new product. Here’s why.
A planned major product upgrade would have been worked into the keynote presentation months ago and there’d be no need to bump a reasonably exciting hardware advance to make room for it. A new product racing toward completion would have been left out of the keynote until the moment Apple’s senior management AND Steve Jobs were sure it was ready to ship.
And that, children, is why this particular AppleFest is going to be a grand adventure.
