koaftder wrote:
So, as a developer, if the processor means almost nothing to me, why the hell should an end user care?
End users do not explicitly care about CPU or architecture. They care about support.
If x86 is everywhere, then as someone developing a product for which you want to gain market acceptance, you go with x86. And if there is limited PPC software because developers are pushing x86, why would the end user want PPC?
x86 is inexpensive. Face it, cheap is what runs the world. And if cheap is not good enough, we will spend R&D on how to make cheap better. IDE vs. SCSI, USB vs. Firewire, 100TX vs 100VG, parallel port devices... the list goes on.
But, to give a more pointed answer to your pointed question, many end users actually do care what CPU is in their computer. I face it on just about every server or workstation order I take: what's AMD, is that a kind of Pentium?
So we add brand recognition to the mix. Everyone knows what Intel and/or Pentium is, and everyone knows what cheap is.
To leave that subject for a moment and tangent over to one of my personal Amiga pet-peeves, I am really tired of reading about how OS4 should work on PPC Macs since there are so many of the old machines out there. If you spend resources developing for old machines, you become old -- especially when it takes five years to finish the product. Five years?! That is a millennium in technology terms. So to ask the question and digress to the original discussion, what do we have now that we have had for almost two decades and will surely be around for another decade or better?
x86(ahem, I prefer x64, though :-))
