Is it particularly chilly in hell today? At the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference in San Francisco this morning, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced a plan to completely migrate from Motorola PowerPC processors to Intel CPUs by 2007. MacWorld has a running commentary from the WWDC, and are holding up to the onsalught of traffic. Amazingly, he reports that for the past five years, every Mac OS build has been compiled to run on the Intel platform. For one, Jobs mentioned that Apple had to make this move to continue to improve the PowerBook line – the PowerPC just wasn’t going to cut it on power and heat issues. Here’s a key quote from Jobs:
“I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you. But as we look ahead, and though we’ve got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can’t envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap.”
First machines will ship with Intel inside (cough, marketing slogan, cough) by this time in 2006. I want to know how this implementation will prevent users from installing the Intel-compatible builds of OSX on generic Intel hardware. If not, this opens the Mac up in ways some thought would never happen. Good luck, Mr. Jobs, and I think congrats are in order.
Update: very good analysis from AppleMatters.com is here. All assumptions aren’t valid, but some are right on target.
