Intel Inside!According to this announcement by Apple they are moving from the IBM PowerPC to the Intel line of processors. This is a major change in the industry and will bring Apple into direct conflict with Microsoft. This has been planned for a while...

"Mr. Jobs said Apple has been working on a Intel-ready version of Mac OS X for the last five years and said, "I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel." - quote in context

And while in the end Apple may only ship 64 bit Intel chips in it's computers, OSX apparently runs just fine on x86 architectures.

"Mr. Jobs demonstrated a version of Mac OS X running on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 system. He showed version 10.4.1 of Max OS X running Apple Mail, Safari, iPhoto, Spotlight and a variety of Dashboard widgets." - quote in context

Some links:

• A live coverage blog of the Keynote speech
•  More than 1,900 comments already on the "Spymac" forums!
• The Mac Observer has an article available on the topic as well

:blink: It'll run on x86 machines? I wonder if I can set up a dual-boot system to make it easier for these beasties to talk to each other.... :wide evil grin: Carolly

"It'll run on x86 machines?" Yup. It was shown on a variety of x86 boxes.

Wonder if it runs on my Athlon64? Mazak

If Steverino really wants to compete with WinNux, then he need to unbundle OSX from his overpriced designer hardware. If the OS is really as elegant, wonderful and zenlike as the faithful claim, Apple could make a lot more more money and have a bigger impact selling the software. It may be that not doing so was the price Bill Gates extracted to produce an Intel version of MacOffice. As it stands, I doubt that the switch to Intel Inside will gain Apple more than a few points of market share--minus a few true believers who will revolt at this apostacy. Of course, Steve could have really shaken things up by going with AMD. Some hacker will probably fix that as soon as OSX-86 hits the street :-)

The interesting thing is that Microsoft was nudging Apple to port their software to the PC environment decades ago. Word and Excel were the dominant office programs on Macs long before they nudged out WordPerfect and Lotus123 on PCs, so Microsoft didn't have a lot to lose. Apple's management saw their future with high priced computer hardware (Macs were about 60% more expensive than comparable PC systems and each sale netted Apple a $1000 in profits). The Mac operating system was seen as a competitive edge for selling the hardware and releasing that software in a PC environment would have negated reasons to buy Apple computers. For a while, there was a Mac-like OS for PCs, GEM, but Apple sued them for being too similar to their OS and eventually Windows 3.1 shunted GEM aside before it ever had a chance to go anywhere. Apparently, GEM is still around as freewhere for low end PCs. In hindsight, Apple's management has come to regret their early decisions, but most would not have done anything different based on the information they had at the time. If Apple is finally porting their OS to PCs, it's a little too late. For somebody who's never used a PC before, there's some reason to look at Apple. There are enough differences between Windows and OSX that it's a bit of a bother switching once somebody is comfortable with the OS they're using. Unless there's an application that's only available on one OSX, there's little real reason to switch.

As long as Microsoft has PC manufacturers shipping Windows intalled on their PC's they has nothing to worry about. That's the reason Apple is only a niche market. Apple can't sell as many as Compact, Dell, Gateway, HP, ect... combined. The same thing happened with Sony and the Betamax right?

I remember the brief period when there were Mac clones before Apple squashed them. Back when the Atari ST was still alive (running GEM), you could make a nice Mac clone with some software and a couple of Mac ROMs. Apple had a long window of opportunity. Windows wasn't a reliably stable OS until at least NT or Windows 2000 and Linux is a relative new kid. Selling expensive hardware may have been tempting but it's hard to see how you could ignore the commoditization of hardware. Creating ITunes was a brilliant move but even there, Apple allowed the competition to get a toehold before expanding to the Windows market. Jobs may be a genius but her seems to have an odd myopia that probably insures Apple's continuing niche status.

Actually MacOS was converted to x86 Wintel platform twice. Once (at least) internally to Apple but never released beyond the porting group, and once by a 3rd party - around the time of the let's-have-Mac-clones, uh-oh, let's-not-says-Jobs debacle. Said 3rd party effort was purchased by Apple PDQ, and the software banished to the Cupertino vaults. These were both true ports, not VM on add-in board solutions. Reportedly both ran very well.

But where does it say that OSX will run on an x86 "Wintel" platform? I couldn't find it. Merely substituting an Intel chip for a PowerPC chip in a Mac hardware platform does nothing for nobody, except presumably Apple's bottom-line. No way is the Intel a better microprocessor design than the PowerPC (or even the AMD 64-bit chip), it's not even close. It's an old and out-dated base design, and has been for years. Not decrying Intel's ability to crank speed out of that design, but its continued existency has much more to do with Micro$oft, near-monopolies and market inertia, than intrinsic merit.

The velocity engine was a nice development. I remember ads talking about how many gigaflops per second the tiny supercomputer-on-a-thumbnail purred through. Programs written to take advantage of it (PhotoShop) purred, too.

Attached Link: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,67749,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4

Per Wired (see link), Apple's reasons for switching to the Intel chip (note: not platform)is because they want what is inside the new Pentium D chips. Intel's DRM code that Hollywood accepts as a medium to transfer movies to other devices (think iPods). If so then it's not about benefits to the Apple user base at all, but extending even more control to those with near-stagnant business models.

The more things change the more they remain the same.

Attached Link: http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2005/6/9/itfeature/11155600&sec=itfeature

Who knows. According to what I read, the main factor was IBM's failure to deliver cooler/lower power chips. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook too, but we havent been able to deliver that to you, he said. Jobs added that although weve got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, but we dont know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap. Rather than outright processing power, Jobs cited power consumption being the main reason.

"If so then it's not about benefits to the Apple user base at all, but extending even more control to those with near-stagnant business models."<<< So apple finally admits that its current chip maker(IBM) will never get them up to the speeds and 64 bit systems that windows users enjoy. So apple moves forward to a bettter chipset which means mac user will enjoy the processing power that PC users do . and now somehow its a nefarious conspiracy to" control people" Sheesh!!!! [ rolls eyes} ;-/

IBM hasn't been delivering on the potential of the PowerPC -- which is a far superior architecture to X86. (EM64T is a semblance of a 64-bit extension built on top of what's basically still an 8 bit chip architecture; PowerPC was designed as a true 64-bit machine from the very beginning. PowerPC was also designed for efficient and scalable multiprocessing, another area in which X86 is particularly poor.) With even a small fraction of the level of investment Intel has dumped into X86, the PowerPC would be running 10 times faster and 10 times cooler -- but IBM has no interest. Intel has such resources that they've managed to make a chip design that was obsolete decades ago continue to improve in performance. An astonishing accomplishment, to be sure; and the chip layout, microcode, and fab design engineers should be proud of the technical accomplishments. But that doesn't change the fact that it's an absurd waste of energy. If it wasn't totally fettered by the outdated requirements of the X86 "facade", the core of a Pentium would scream. The true technological wizardry is that these amazing chips can so accurately and completely pretend to be so much less than they really are. (It's a software emulator on a chip, really.) Apple has been building and testing Mac OS X and the bundled apps on X86 chips since the very beginning; only the announcement and public demonstration is new. They've been ready in case Motorola and IBM couldn't deliver -- as they haven't. This is a pragmatic business decision. Nothing to do with PowerPC vs X86, really; but rather with the commitment of IBM vs Intel. While the first Intel Macs are expected to be Pentium M chips, in laptops and/or mini enclosures, desktop and server systems will follow, probably with the next generation of EM64T chips.

Intel hasn't only been concentrating on making x86 live forever. They also have Itanium (Now Itanium 2), their clean slate 64 bit CPU design. They wanted everyone to move to that as the new 64 bit future of computing. Unfortunately for them, it's never sold all that well. AMD recognized that while the market values innovation, it values compatibility even more--so Opteron/AMD64 has been a great success. Intel responded late with the inferior EMT64 which will probably be successful only because it sports the Intel logo. In an ideal world, we'd all be running DEC's fantastic Alpha chip which Compaq (Now HP) allowed to die. AMD wisely incorporated part of that technology, Hypertransport, in their chips. I'd read great things about IBM's new generation Power chips but apparently, they couldn't get the heat/power consumption down. A few years ago, that might have been OK but things are increasingly moving to mobile platforms today and do everything laptops. You can't have your sexy PowerBook hooked up to an extension cord so sayonara IBM, hello Intel. I don't think anyone would have predicted the longevity of the x86 platform but look at how long things like COBOL have survived. If moving to new computer technology were as simple as say remastering vinyl records to CDs it would be different. Moving working code to an entirely new architecture is a lot harder and riskier. As long as you can get better performance from faster versions of the same platform, there's little incentive to switch. Of course, IBM is now betting that their new Cell processor will be the next great thing. From the Playstation to a workstation--I suppose stranger things have happened.