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: