Johan Sørensen

The day the reality distortion field imploded

Tuesday June 07, 2005

I’ll happily admit that I did not see Apple switching to Intel right now. In fact, I denied it as the loose rumor it felt like. But here we are.

The fact that Mac OSX has been living “a secret double” life in Cupertino should be no secret to anyone who have done their homework on the foundation of OSX. Just-in-case is a good enough reason for that.

At first I didn’t know what to think, but since then and the news being somewhat settled in I realize that this is in general a Good Thing™. With the help of the developers, Apple now theoretically has the option of switching the architecture back and forth should the need arise, or simply if one product range makes more since to use one CPU. However that probably won’t be the case, as the man said, this is a transition. Transitions might have backups, but the main purpose of it is to transit into something else; Intel powered. At least for now.

While in general being a Good Thing™, I think there’s a few things which will be interesting to see how they play out.

• If the Intel-macs has some sort of Apple ROM (like all macs has today), when will someone bright enough find a way around that and install OSX on their own homebuilt PC?
• What implications will better (as in pretty much native speed) windows emulation have? I can see either a very bright or a very dark feature for Mac games/ports.
• Is the ultimate goal to try and battle with Longhorn on all PCs? Or do Apple want to stay a hardware company, something they excel in (certainly consumer/design wise), and prevent OSX running on every other PC but their own.

I for one, welcome our new Intel overlords. But I hope we’ll never see that “Intel Inside” sticker on a mac or hear that jingle in any Apple commercial.

---