June 6, 2005 10:36 AM PDT Jobs confirms Apple switch to Intel SAN FRANCISCO--After years of trying to get people to switch to Macs from Intel-based computers, Apple Computer itself has switched.
CEO Steve Jobs announced on Monday that Apple would gradually shift its Mac line to Intel-based chips over the next two years. The move confirms a timetable first reported by CNET News.com.
Jobs' announcement formed the centerpiece of a keynote speech to Mac programmers attending the company's annual Worldwide Developer Conference here. The conference, expected to draw some 3,800 attendees this year, is a traditional venue for Apple product launches.
In his speech, Jobs revealed that Apple has been developing all versions of OS X since its inception to run on both Intel and PowerPC chips.
"Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life the past five years," he said.
The CEO showed a demo of the Tiger operating system on an Intel-based machine, saying, "We've been running on an Intel system all morning."
The move to Intel marks a tectonic shift for Apple, which has used processors from IBM and Motorola (now Freescale Semiconductor) throughout the life of the Mac. However, the company has changed architectures before, shifting in the 1990s from Motorola's 68000 family of chips to the PowerPC architecture jointly developed by IBM and Motorola.
I don't think this is a bad thing, remember Jobs saying they'd hit 3.0 in 2004? IBM's chips were just tapped-out to the point they were using liquid-cooling on the 2.5s, which is a bad sign. a really, really bad sign-people were hitting 4.0 with a64 on water and phase-change.
interestingly, intel's pretty far behind amd for desktop/workstation stuff, i would have thought the natural replacement for the g5 would have been some kinda dual-core opteron. but intel's laptop chips are by far the best out there--they're incredibly fast at low-clockspeeds and they do it at as low as 25watts. meaning they're not hot chips and don't take much juice to do things quickly.
Well, but with Apple it was always like a religion. Wasn´t it always anti-WINTEL in their community. So this must look like some sort of blasphemy to deep-rooted Apple disciples.
apple has been relying on other companies' semiconductor-arms for years and intel makes some of the best chipsets out there.
apple's been pro-DRM for a while and intel can give them hardware-level DRM with the pentium-D. the xxRA's are going to be thrilled with this move. i'm not, to say the least.
what apple does best is the OS, they've been lying about and overpricing their hardware for a while and intel's obviously got fabs with the capacity to get them a modern processor in their powerbooks.
i think the signifigance of this is a big win for copy-protection, the end of anything interesting for the desktop, and a solution to the lack of a g5-laptop. i can't imagine apple holding onto whatever share of the multimedia market it's got if FCP,photoshop, etc. aren't going to be optimized as heavily for apple-hardware. dual opteronx2's are simply too good at reasonable prices.
I think this is a very smart move for Apple. They have always been more of an innovator in software than hardware. PC hardware is such a commodity these days that it's stupid to not take advantage of the economies of scale that the Intel/AMD platforms offer.
Apple has finally come full-circle. Early in their existence they decided to keep their expansion architecture private and their operating systems closed. They eventually came around and opened up to the clone market but it was far too little about a decade too late.
I would be at least a little worried if I were Michael Dell.
I'm not surprised by today's announcement. There have been rumors of an Intel OS X source tree running parallel to the PowerPC tree for years.
The fact that Darwin (OS X's FreeBSD core - basically the operating system guts without the GUI) compiles on x86 was an indicator that Apple has aware of what was going on in Intel-land.
As a current iBook owner, I really don't care whose logo is on the chips, as long as the software runs.
As a matter of fact, the fact that Apple uses IBM chips is amusing; way back in the Eighties when IBM introduced the IBM PC, they were the enemy, not Intel or Microsoft.
The partnership between Apple and IBM for the ill-fated MagicLink PDA and GeneralMagic software company even inspired someone to create t-shirts modeled after the "This Is Your Brain on Drugs" fried egg ad campaign. On the front of the t-shirt was the original seven-color Apple logo with "This is Apple". On the back was Apple's logo + IBM's striped logo with "This is Apple on drugs".
But the world has changed a bit. IBM no longer manufactures PCs (sold the Think product line to Lenovo of China), Motorola doesn't make chips, Apple is going to Intel.
It's a commodity business now. Just like professional sports.
Yeah, I was ready to buy a new PowerBook to replace my three-year-old 600MHz G3 iBook, but I'm toying with the idea of saving $500 and just go for the cheap G4 iBook until the Intel laptops show up (I was originally planning on getting a 20" Apple LCD too).
I won't touch the next generation machines until they show reliability and performance. That'll probably be a year after they've been released which may put my Intel purchase to 2008 which is about the right time for me to upgrade the PowerPC machine I'm about to purchase anyhow.
I've been following the talk about this over in the forums on arstechnica.com, which has a large percentage of Mac users (~30% last time they did a poll), and in the hundreds of posts to their message board about it, I've seen a few interesting scraps of info.
The single most important was that IBM apparantly makes no money from selling PPC970's to Apple... they break even, but that's it. Apparantly Steve tried negotiating a lower price from IBM for them, and trying to get a low-power mobile version as well, but IBM wasn't interested; Apple makes up such a small portion of IBM Microelectronic's business - especially now that IBM has the CPU's for all of the next gen game console - that it wasn't worth spending the money for the small volume Apple sells (especially the powermacs - I think Apple only sells 200,000 a quarter now). Motorola gave up on Apple a while ago, when they were able to sell far more G4's as embedded processors than as desktop chips.
Essentially, Apple went this route because they didn't really have any other choice; there wasn't any other way to be certain to get desktop & mobile chips with enough performance other than by going with Intel. The performance gap isn't actually as bad now as it was during the G4 era, but the difference now is that Apple has a portable codebase that allows them to produce software for multiple architectures simultaneously - which OS X inherited from it's ancestor OpenStep - and this gave them the ability to go with Intel, and use the future dual core Pentium M derivatives as the basis for their computers.
NOW, for those of you who are worried about support for PowerPC macs: you shouldn't be. One of the features that OS X inherited from Openstep is the ability to produce 'fat binaries', which have the executable code for mulitple architectures contained in the binary file. It hasn't been used so far, but future software produced using XCode will be able to run on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs, and PowerPC will be supported for a few years after the transition is finished in 2007, so those of with PowerPC based Macs don't have anything to worry about.
Of course, once they produce an x86 version of their OS, I forsee people porting Mac-On-Linux to x86 Linux so they can run OS X for Intel on their Athlon 64's.... and my prediction is that it'll be about a month before it's cracked and being passed around on the filesharing networks
