Intel’s Paul Otellini Loves His Mac
How times have changed.
In 1998, while I was still working for TIME magazine, Andy Grove stopped by to chat with the editors about the wrenching changes the Internet was going to force on the computer industry. Future PCs, he said, wouldn’t be general purpose computers to which networking has been added as an afterthought, but networking machines that also do computing. “The iMac embodies a lot of the things I’m talking about,” Grove said. “Sometimes what Apple does has an electrifying effect on the rest of us.”
I went back to my desk and banged out a one-graph story for Time.com. “Intel chairman Andy Grove,” I wrote, “has seen the future of computing and it is … a Macintosh.”
The next day I got a call from Intel PR. Grove wasn’t particularly happy about the piece, but he was positively livid about the headline that ran above it — ANDY GROVE LOVES HIS MAC — because it implied that the chairman of Intel (INTC) actually owned an Apple (AAPL) computer. We printed a version of the story in the magazine the next week with a different headline, and Intel was mollified — although the next time I saw Grove he smiled and said if I ever did that again he would sue.
I’m reminded of all this by a Q&A I read yesterday with the current CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini. He’s not ashamed to admit that he uses Apple products. In fact, he says,
“My wife and I both have iPhones. My wife came in with a jacket for her phone. She was all excited. It’s a flimsy little thing. It cost $39. It probably cost 6ยข to make.” He adds that he uses a ThinkPad for work and a MacBook Pro for his personal life, including his personal photos and music. (link)
Only nine years have passed, but how times have changed.
Andy liked Apple’s concept with the 1998 iMac but not the fact that at the time, they used PowerPC processors from Motorola and IBM. This was why Andy continuously courted Apple to switch to Intel even during this timeframe. The problem for Apple was backwards compatibility with the installed base of mostly classic Mac OS users.
According to some former Apple people in the know, Jobs wanted to migrate to Intel earlier (to coincide with the Mac OS X transition) but the technology wasn’t mature to allow what Apple is doing now; Intel processors that are much faster than PPC chips which allows most PPC apps written for OS X to run decently using dynamic translation software from Transitive. It also helped that as the years went on, the installed base moved towards Mac OS X and away from classic Mac OS. With that in place, transitioning to Intel became much easier since Apple didn’t have to deal with the whole issue of Classic on Intel (something they could have done but made little sense to do due to diminishing returns with regards to programming and QA time).
So true, Paul! Why wasn’t that fact mentioned in your article?? INTEL and MAC are on the same team now. BTW, Apple will be $200 a share within a month.
Next stage: he’ll retire the ThinkPad and just bring his MacBook Pro to work.
What you neglect to mention in the article is the major change that occurred between the two incidents: Apple NOW USES INTEL CHIPS!
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
RE: Apple NOW USES INTEL CHIPS!
Gosh, do you think there are people out there who don’t know this? I mean, people who care?
If you’ve followed anything about Apple for the past few years, you do have some knowledge of the working partnerships. Didya year, iPhone works on an AT&T system. Shhhh. Keep it secret.