Apple and Intel hook up.

Intel Inside

So if you haven’t heard, yesterday 6/6/05 Apple announced they are moving from the PowerPC CPU to Intel based processors. If I hadn’t heard it from the horses mouth (Steve Jobs) and if he didn’t do it at WWDC (their annual World Wide Developers Conference) I wouldn’t have believed it. Its been rumored for more than 10 years, but this time its real.

My good friend Damien wrote an interesting piece you can read here…

Live from WWDC: Apple switches to Intel. What does it all mean? (By Damien Stolarz)

My understanding is that in the short term, nothing is really changing. In the long term there are many industry ramifications, but to the consumer, it really doesn’t matter. It means some faster Mac laptops and a different logo on your CPU.

For the consumer:

  1. You will still need to own a Mac to run OS X (according to Damien Stolarz quoting Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller) . Yes, I’m sure there will be interesting hacks to make them work on non-apple machines, but that won’t be supported.

  2. Initial non-fat(compiled for both CPU’s) binaries (applications) will run slowly on Intel based macs using “Rosetta” apple’s emulation layer.

  3. Interestingly, also according to Damien Stolarz “Schiller said Apple wouldn’t do anything to preclude people running Windows on Intel-based Macs.” Meaning windows fans of the Apple laptops/desktops can run windows.

  4. Apple will ship Intel based macs Jun 2006.

  5. They will continue to update and create better/faster PPC based machines until at least 2007.

Long run questions:

  1. Will it mean cheaper Macs? Unclear, but it will at least allow it to happen if Apple chooses to.

  2. Will it mean lower quality support from apple? Unclear, but bigger markets are harder and more expensive to support.

  3. Will they still innovate? Absolutely, in fact partnering with Intel is probably the best way Apple can drive the industry to support new technologies. Bluetooth, 802.11, 1394 Firewire, USB…apple didn’t invent all of them, but they certainly drove the industry to use them.

  4. Will it mean worse Stability? Probably not, they’ve been compiling OS X (every version) and all of the Apple Apps (iTunes/iPhoto/iMovie/etc…) for both Intel and PPC for the past 5 years secretly.

  5. Will it mean worse Security? Unknown, A Windows virus might run fine inside an emulated environment. Could it get out?

  6. What will it mean for 64-bit computing? Good question, since they are going to keep making PPC’s until at least the end of 2007, Intel could easily come out with a 64-bit chip by then, and really we don’t know what the first chip will be. The development box is a 3.6Ghz P4 for what its worth…

Stay tuned…

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