I spotted a story on news.com this morning which said that Apple are going to move away from IBM PowerPC chips to Intel supplied x86 chips for their computers. The article goes on to say that this will be officially announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday by Steve Jobs.
Robert Scoble predicted this two weeks ago and was disbelieved at the time despite having his own version of Deep Throat!
But, I don’t want to say anything because then Steve Jobs might sue me to find out my sources.
Apple is reputed to be moving away from IBM due to supply problems (and the difficulty in creating a G5 for PowerBooks has to be an issue as well).
Apart from the issues this raises for developers, I would be concerned that this will raise security issues for Mac owners. My concern arises from the fact that malware and spyware often can’t run on a Mac due to its non-x86 architecture – this security advantage will be done away with if/when Apple shifts to the x86.
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