[rescue] your next Solaris machine ??? (Sol/x86 booting on iMac)

["Javi Mahai <lefa at ucsc.edu>" at ucsc.edu]

On Sun, 16 Apr 2006 05:41:58 -0500 (CDT)
  Steven Hill <sjh at waroffice.net> wrote:
>> True... but, no one was making enough G5's to meet 
>>demand. Apple lost sales
>> due to nearly 2 years of *ZERO* improvement in the G5, 
>>and frequently ran out
>> of them and production stalled.
> 
> Apple should have ordered a sensible amount then - the 
>problem stems 
> with them ordering 100 chips instead of 1,000,000 at a 
>time. IBM commit 
> their fabs to do runs for other people, then Apple cry 
>when IBM turn 
> round and say, but you only asked for 100!
> 
> If Apple had taken their collective thumbs out of their 
>arses, I don't 
> think this would have ever been an issue.
> 

It is not that simple, IBM had problems with their 90nm 
process for a while. So it was not an "ordering" issue. 
Initially IBM could not meet the demand because of the low 
yield, they also had a difficult time meeting the roadmap 
for the ramping of the core that they had prosmised apple. 
The last straw was the fact that during the negotiations 
for the G6, IBM pretty much sent Apple packing since it 
was not an attractive proposition to them. They were 
making little money on the G5 as it was, so they were not 
interested in wasting any more resources on the G6. Simple 
as that, IBM told Apple in simplified terms "You want a 
G6? here is what is gonna cost ya" and Apple got a sticker 
shock and went looking somewhere else. It made no sense 
for Apple to depend on a nice cpu when they have to 
compete against X86 on the desktop.