Talk about turnabout...after years of trying to get people to switch from Intel-based computers to Macs, Apple Computer itself has switched. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has announced that Apple will gradually shift its Mac line to Intel-based chips over the next two years.
Jobs' announcement formed the centerpiece of a keynote speech to Mac programmers attending the company's annual Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. The conference is a traditional venue for Apple product launches.
Apple will begin moving its systems to Intel processors by June 2006 and will finish the transition by June 2007, according to Jobs. He underscored his point by demonstrating a Power Mac running Apple applications on a 3.6GHz Intel Pentium 4.
The move will be made possible by work that's been ongoing at Apple for some time. Apple's Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life, having been compiled for both for Intel and the PowerPC, Apple's current processor of choice, Jobs said in the keynote. The company will support the PowerPC, which currently uses IBM's PowerPC 970FX chip, for some time to come.
Apple will use dynamic translation software called Rosetta, named after the famous Rosetta stone, to allow applications designed for PowerPC chips to run on Apple's Intel systems.
To underscore the point, Jobs showed Adobe Systems Inc.'s PhotoShop running and opened Microsoft Word and Excel files on an Apple-Intel system. The chief executives from Adobe and Intel joined Jobs on stage to express their rapport.
Apple, which has been maintaining a complete version of OS X for Intel chips, (code-named Marklar) in secret for some time, could not build the machines it wanted with IBM PowerPC chips inside, given their power consumption. Intel won out, he said, on watts. Although he declined to say specifically what new products he had in mind, the implications of Jobs' comments are that IBM's PowerPC roadmap will not meet Apple's needs for notebooks and miniature desktops, both of which are sensitive to power consumption and heat.
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