In case you missed the announcement elsewhere – both Apple and Intel have released press releases here and here respectively announcing that Apple is to move its entire line to the x86 architecture by 2007 with the first Intel Mac being rolled out this time next year.
Steve Jobs and Intel CEO Paul Otellini jointly announced the news at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco where Steve Jobs was delivering the keynote address. The keynote was delivered on a Mac running OS X Tiger on an Intel CPU!
According to Steve Jobs, there have been concurrent versions of OS X capable of running on x86 for the last five years.
According to Dave Winer:
Apple is not going into the software business, their operating system will not run on other vendor’s hardware. So you won’t be running the Mac OS on Dell, HP or IBM, for example
and further:
While Windows is not explicitly supported, they won’t do anything to prevent Windows from running on their hardware
That last bit is interesting as it means that the market for Microsoft’s Virtual PC for Mac, has just disappeared! Great – I run Virtual PC on my Mac and it is a dog!
Personally, I have a 2 year old 1ghz PowerBook with 1gb ram. It is just beginning to show its age. It seems increasingly unlikely that there will be a G5 PowerBook so I am going to have to wait at least another 12 months before I can upgrade this PowerBook – if it is for a faster, better lighter laptop running OS X – I don’t really care if it is a G5 or a Pentium under the cover – as long as it is a Mac!
If Apple included a dual-booting system (upon starting the computer, the user would be presented with a screen which asked the user to select which OS to start), Apple could effectively corner the market. Why buy a PC and a Mac when you could by a Mac that boots into both Mac OS X and Windows?
Why bother using OS X at all when the same hardware will run Windows?
That’s the question application developers are probably asking themselves right now.
Mark – ever heard of spyware or malware? Well, as a Mac user, I don’t have any anti virus software on my Macs, nor any anti-spyware – why, ‘cos there is no spyware or malware for Macs. I can’t count the number of PC’s I have cleaned of that crud – that’s one reason.
Tom
Even though I’m not a Mac user, I like the platform. But what annoys me about this is the choice of processor family they’re migrating to.
I mean, the x86 series? The lineage of that abortion of a processor family stretches almost back to the 4004. If it was just about the bulk and price of the processors, surely they could have migrated to something like the ARM: fast, low-power processors that work well in everything from embedded system to supercomputers. They’ve got one of the most elegant instruction sets around, and there’s piles of companies out there producing them.
The mind boggles really. Or maybe I just wish the x86 series would just die already, like it ought to have done years ago.
You make a valid point Keith – mind you, I don’t remember them saying at any point in the presentation that they were specifically choosing the x86 chipset!
Well, let’s hope it’s a variant on the XScale or something. If it’s not that then it’ll have to the the x86.
Oops! Forgot about the Itanium.
Something just popped into my head. This is basically a rehash of Apple’s old Star Trek project: http://tinyurl.com/3ade8
Wow – I never knew the full story behind the old Star Trek project Keith.
Thanks for the link.
Of course, the difference between the old Star Trek project and the current move to Intel’s chipset is that this time it has been announced officially. It is going to happen.