Apple Goes Intel; End of World Near?
The news has been whispered (more like hissed) around the Macintosh news world: Apple is getting "Intel Inside." Has Steve Jobs finally lost it?
In truth, the development has been brewing for years. Since OS X was based on NextStep, which previously ran on Intel chips, converting to x86 was always a possibility. The story goes that from at least 2002, deep inside Apple's skunkworks, a current version of OS X has been running on Intel-based PCs as part of a secret project codenamed "Marklar." Supposedly, only a small team of software engineers were needed to do the necessary updates.
Two years ago, the rumors initially flared up, just before Apple announced the G5 systems. Now, Apple has been straining to come up with an upgrade to its aging Powerbook and iBook families. The current G4 chip is manufactured by a spin-off to Motorola, Apple's former chip-development partner, now called Freescale. With neither IBM nor Freescale having been able to deliver a speedy, low-power and low-heat processor, the move to Intel seemed a natural consequence.
This morning, at the San Francisco Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs took the podium for the Keynote address and confirmed the speculations: for years, Mac OS X has been leading a secret "double life."
First, however, he spoke about the developer community "thriving" with the highest attendance at the show in a decade, and more than 500,000 members of Apple's "Developer Connection" program. He then proceeded to pump up Apple acolytes with propaganda about the success of the retail store operation. He moved on to the iPod (16 million, 76% of all MP3 players sold) and iTunes (over 430 million songs, 82% of all songs sold online) Then onto the latest advance in iTunes: integrated "podcasting", which seems to have Jobs particularly excited. (Could he be a closet Podcast junkie?)
But what everyone wanted to know was: what's this stuff about Intel?
Here's what Jobs had to say:
Now, let's go to a big topic: transition. Let's talk about transitions...
The Mac in its history has had two major transitions so far... The first one: 68k to PowerPC. And that transition happened about 10 years ago in the mid-90s. I wasn't here then, but the team then did a great job from everything I hear. [audience laughter] And the PowerPC set Apple up for the next decade. It was a good move.
The second major transition has been even bigger. And that has been the transition from OS 9 to OS 10 that we just finished a few years ago-- the early part of this decade. This was a brain transplant. And even though these operating systems vary in name only by "one" they are worlds apart in their technology. OS 10 is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years.
Today it's time to begin a third transition. We want to constantly be making the best computers for you and the rest of our users. And so it's time for a third transition... and yes, it's true: we are going to begin the transition from the PowerPC to Intel processors. And we are going to begin it for you now, and for our customers next year.
Now, why are we going to do this? Didn't we just get through going from OS 9 to OS x. Isn't the business great right now? Why do we want another transition? Because we want to be making the best computers for our customer looking forward. Now I stood up here two years ago in front of you and I promised you this... [indicating 3Ghz G5] and we haven't been able to deliver that to you yet. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your Powerbook, and we haven't been able to deliver that to you yet. But these aren't even the most important reasons. The most important reasons are, that as we look ahead-- though we have great products right now, and we've got some great PowerPC products yet to come-- as we look ahead, we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you, and we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap. And that's why we're going to do this. When we look at Intel, they've got great performance, yes. But they've got something else that's very important to us. Just as important as performance is power consumption. And the way we look at it is "performance per watt" -- for one watt of power how much performance do you get? And when we look at the future roadmaps, projected out mid-2006 and beyond, what we see is the PowerPC gives us sort of 15 units of performance per watt, but the Intel roadmap in the future gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do. Now, this is not going to be a transition that happens overnight. It's going to happen over a period of a few years. Again, we've some great products right now. And we've got some great PowerPC products in the pipeline yet to be introduced.
But starting next year, we will begin introducing Macs with Intel processors in them and over time, this transition will occur. So when we meet here again this time next year, our plan is to be shipping Macs with Intel processors by then. And when we meet here again two years from now, our plan is that the transition will be mostly complete. And we think that it will be complete by the end of 2007. So this is a two year transition...
There are two major challenges in this transition:
The first one is making Mac OS X sing on Intel processors. Now, I have something to tell you today: Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life for the past five years. [applause]
There have been rumors to this effect. But this is Apple's campus in Cupertino. Let's zoom in on it. in that building right there, we've had teams doing the "just in case" scenario. And our rules have been that our designs for OS Ten must be processor independent, and that every project must be built for both the PowerPC and Intel processors. So today, for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for both PowerPC and Intel. This has been going on for the last five years...[laughter and applause] Just in case.
So Mac OS X is cross platform by design, right from the very beginning. So Mac OS Ten is singing on Intel processors. And I'd like to show you right now. As a matter of fact, the system I've been using here... [applause] let's go have a look... We've been running on an Intel system all morning. And let's just go do a few simple things... [demonstrates functions]
So this is Mac OS X running on Intel processors.
We are very far along on this. But we're not done. Which is why we're going to put it in your hands real soon, so that you can help us finish it.
Now, the second major challenge: your apps. So let's take a look at how you're going to make Intel versions of your apps...
