Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dropped a bombshell in his keynote speech opening this week’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. ”Yes, it’s true,” said Jobs, confirming the rumours. ”We are transitioning from PowerPC to Intel processors.”
Jobs said Apple will start shipping Intel-based Macs next year, and will complete the transition by the end of 2007. This represents a significant U-turn for Apple, which has attacked Intel in its advertising. Jobs has even run side-by-side demos to show that Macs with IBM PowerPC chips were faster than PCs with Intel processors.
Mac software is incompatible with Pentium chips and will need to be rewritten or recompiled to run on Intel-based machines. However, during his speech, Jobs demonstrated a program called Rosetta, which will do the recompilation while programs are running. This is said to run old Mac applications ”fast enough”.
In the future, software developers will be expected to produce two versions of their programs: one for PowerPC — and one for Intel-based Macs. Jobs said Apple would support both architectures for a long time.
None the less, there is a risk that the announcement will have a ”chilling effect” on Mac sales. Some users will be put off buying PowerPC-based Macs believing they could become obsolete within a few months.
Intel will be the third incompatible processor used in Macs since 1984. Originally, Apple used the Motorola 68000 range and in the 1990s, it moved to the IBM PowerPC line.
The switch is another step in a long line of changes, whereby the company has modified the Mac’s design to follow PC industry standards. SCSI disks, NuBus expansion slots, ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connectors and other features have been abandoned for Serial ATA disks, Intel PCI expansion slots, USB ports and so on. Using the same parts has enabled Apple to benefit from the huge economies of scale and wide choice of suppliers generated by the Wintel market.
The move has also been facilitated by the change from the now obsolete Mac OS, last seen in Mac OS 9, to a version of BSD Unix known as NextStep, which already ran on Intel processors.
In 1996, Apple bought NextStep for $427-million from Next and used it to create Mac OS X. The Intel version has been maintained ever since. Jobs said: ”Every release of OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel … just in case.”
Apple is now offering Intel-based Macs to its software developers as part of a $999 transition kit.
The switch may also lead to some new types of Mac, as Intel Pentium M chips, used in the Centrino chip set, could be used to make ”thin and light” notebooks and tablet PCs.
An Apple spokesperson said the company would not sell or support Microsoft Windows on Intel-based Macs, but it would not install hardware to prevent Windows from running. Also, it would not enable Mac OS X to run on any non-Apple PCs.
Whether hackers can find a way around this remains to be seen. – Guardian Unlimited Â