Will Apple Go With Intel? (Hint: Yes)

I

posted this to The Farm, but I thought it bore

repeating here…

That’s the

question

on

the

tech

industry’s

collective

mind

at

the

moment.

My counterpart at Microsoft, Robert Scoble, writes:

…the

entire industry is shaking because of Steve Jobs’ decision. It’s

impossible to know all the details until the shaking subsides a bit.

It will be one of the most interesting weeks in technology

since I started blogging, that’s for sure.

Although the keynote isn’t being webcast,

the

tech blog Engadget

has been keeping everyone apprised of Steve Jobs’ announcements at

WWDC

2005 by live-blogging the event, and it’s official: Apple is

switching to Intel chips!

The way he’s been doing it is quite dramatic — the keynote

slides,

which were presented on Mac OS X using Apple’s Keynote app was running

on a P4 3.6GHz!

Some quick notes, based on the available info thus

far:

• Two years ago, Jobs promised a

  3.0GHz

  PowerMac, and hasn’t been able to deliver since the PowerPC still

  hasn’t hit those speeds.

• The

  Intel architecture also offers more processing power for less

  electrical power: 70 integer performance units/watt versus PowerPC’s

  15.

• A personal obersavtion: You may want to keep

  an eye on this page,

  which shows PowerPC G5 configurations outperforming Intel

  configurations. I expect that it will disappear from Apple’s

  site shortly.

• The

  rumours about the “Just in Case” scenario — the ones that mentioned

  that a team within Apple has been making sure that OS X compiles on

  Intel — are true! According to Jobs, for the past 5 years,”Mac OS X

  has been

  living a secret double life.”

• The lowdown for

  Mac developers:

• Widgets, scripts and

  Java should just work from the get-go.

• Cocoa/Xcode apps should need “just a small tweak” and a

  recompile.

• Carbon/Xcode apps will need “a few

  weeks of tweaking” and a recompile.

• Carbon/Metrowerks apps should be moved to XCode.
• A new technology,

  Rosetta, will run existing PowerPC apps on

  Intel. 

This may be all the

tech

publications and sites talk about for the next little while…