Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has announced in his keynote speech to the World Wide Developer Conference, that over the next two years, Apple will move to the Intel platform. All Macintoshes will be delivered with Intel inside by this time next year with the move completed by 2007.
Jobs said that Apple want to offer users the best PC in the world and added ‘looking ahead Intel has the strongest processor roadmap by far’. The announcement was accompanied by a demonstration of OSX Tiger running on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 based machine.
Developer kits are already available to allow developers to produce applications for both PowerPC and Intel based machines with both Apple and Intel providing libraries for compiling for the Intel platform in the near future. Jobs unveiled Xcode 2.1 which allows developers to build applications for either Intel or PowerPC using the same tools and universal binaries.
The move has implications for Mac software but key Mac application providers Microsoft and Adobe are both aboard. ‘We plan to create future versions of Microsoft Office for the Mac that support both PowerPC and Intel processors,’ said Roz Ho, general manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit. ‘We think this is a really smart move on Apple’s part and plan to create future versions of our Creative Suite for Macintosh that support both PowerPC and Intel processors,’ said Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe. Both Office and Adobe applications formed part of the live demonstration on Intel hardware.
The announcement comes as Apple finds itself without a G5 chip suitable for notebooks. Loosing ground to other laptop manufacturers, the G5 has been too power hungry to make a practical laptop processor. With a switch to Intel, speculation is that the Centrino platform will be the basis for Apple’s mobile range for the future.
As rumours of the move emerged, discussion has produced some interesting questions not readily answered by the announcement. One of these is the possibility of a volume manufacturer producing hardware for Apple. In the same way that the iPod design has been licensed, speculation is rife that a Dell or HP could produce Macs in a way that would see them emerge from their current market niche into the mainstream.
With more questions than answers, Apple’s announcement of a move to Intel makes an interesting counterpoint to Microsoft’s adoption of a PowerPC variant for the Xbox 360, or rather three of them.
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