2003: Crystal Ball Gazing


Apple will gain market share in 2003. That's one among Loyd Case's '8 Predictions and a Funeral' article posted at ZD's Extreme Tech.

Loyd sees the 'OS wars' continuing, but doesn't tip Linux as the emerging *nix as many pundits have predicted.

On the down side, the article prophesies that Dell will become a behemoth in the PC world and will beat out HP-Compaq. Conversely, the story also thinks HP will pose more of a threat to IBM in the e-services game. Plus the printing business will give HP room to breathe.

For Microsoft the 'next' Windows - codenamed Longhorn - is the next 'killer app', according to Case. Meanwhile, he says, the CPU makers are looking for something that actually needs 3GHz - and Longhorn could be just the ticket. But as far as x86 is concerned, Hammer from AMD will get most of the attention, says the crystal ball.

Memory? Now that the memory bus is one of the slowest parts of a system (we're excluding hard drives here), front-side buses are expected to increase in performance, while DDR-1 memory of 400MHz may well become the standard - at least on the Intel side of things.

Graphics, too, is slated to improve in leaps and bounds. AGP 8x is deemed too pedestrian, but PCI Express - the third-generation PCI bus - will be big news for PCs' internal architecture. Current iterations of PCI support no more than 128MB/ps, while PCI Express is designed for a maximum throughput of 2.5Gb/ps and support for system speeds up to 10GHz. There's room for development of PCI Express which could see it running (in G3 or third-generation spec) at over 12Gb/ps.

PCs will also become 'more "flexible and compact" and we're about to see the "small form factor PC will finally gain some respect". In our book, it already has - it's called a notebook.

Analysis: Predictions? Dangerous stuff, but here goes:
- White box market will grow bigger.
- As will XServe sales.
- Notebooks will get close to 40% of the PC market.
- Dell can't possibly sustain profitability at the prices they sell for long temr unless Gateway and eMachines crawl away and die and HP goes into hibernation.
- Apple will introduce the PPC 970 (they'd damn well better).