News & Views

The rumors have been flying fast and furious lately. Apple talking to Intel about a switch. They popped up around May 20 or so in the Wall Street Journal, then faded away as a bunch of pundits said it was just a ploy by Apple to get negotiating power with IBM. Those pundits don't know Steve Jobs very well. He is very intense and seems like the kind of guy who wouldn't waste his time bluffing.

Now it is official. Apple will begin shipping some of their Macs with Intel microprocessors next year, and convert the entire line of computers by the end of 2007. CEO Steve Jobs announced it at his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address in San Francisco on June 6.

Secret Double Life
It has long been rumored that Apple had a secret Intel project as a "just in case." I remember reading rumors back in 2002. Dell Computer had successfully commoditized computers by then. (Turned them into commodities, where the only consideration is price, because most people see them as all the same.) Apple has had a hard time competing on price, largely due to the cost of the PowerPC processors. And there has been trouble with IBM. Most of us remember shipping delays of new models over the past couple of years, due to IBM's inability to produce sufficient numbers of processors. And, IBM hasn't delivered on its other promises. No 3GHz and no portable- friendly G5's.

Jobs confirmed that Mac OS X has led a secret life for the last five years where it has been developed in tandem for PowerPC and Intel processors under a project called "Marklar." Tiger is completely ready to run on Intel. He demonstrated Marklar on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 system, including iApps.

Jobs also demonstrated Rosetta, which translates binaries on-the-fly to transparently run PowerPC code on Intel processors without any porting work. It comes from Apple having adapted Transitive's QuickTransit code morphing engine. Transitive announced their product in October, 2004, saying that QuickTransit allows applications to run transparently on multiple hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes. This technology should help Apple to put all the folks with PowerPC based computers at ease. Your investment is not "at risk" because of this change. The "universal binaries" should enable apps designed for Intel to still run on our PowerPCs.

Major Vendor Support
Adobe and Microsoft have both publicly committed to compiling its software for Macs using Intel processors.

New Developer Tools for Intel
Xcode 2.1 is available now supporting both PowerPC and Intel development, and the creation of "universal binaries" that run on both processors. Apple is encouraging developers to create for Intel. Dashboard Widgets, scripts and Java code don't need to be re- worked to run on Intel-based Macs, while Cocoa apps developed with Xcode will require a few days of porting work and recompiling. Carbon apps developed with Xcode will require a few weeks of work; apps developed with Metroworks CodeWarrior will need to be moved over to Xcode.

A developer kit with a 3.6GHz P4 Intel-based "Mac," OS X 10.4.1 for Intel, and Rosetta will begin shipping in mid-to-late June.

The next version of Mac OS X will be "Leopard," and will be released in late 2006 or early 2007. Leopard will mainly focus on the transition to Intel/x86. As Apple succumbs to commoditization of hardware, Leopard will focus on unique features including an extremely graphically-rich user interface makeover, leveraging the meta-data technology (we call it Spotlight) introduced in Tiger.