(Funny, I remember when we were supposed to bash IBM…)
Fig. 1. The “Sluggo??? Power Computing ad (featuring art by Frank Kozik), circa 1996
So, more big geeknews (assuming of course that it’s non-fiction): Apple throwing over IBM for Intel. Remember when Apple (to say nothing of the larger Mac community) bashed Intel? During the transition from 680×0 to PowerPC, back in the clone days? I guess Steve is putting the last nail in the whole clone/PowerPC/PReP coffin here.
Apple […] will begin a phased transition to Intel’s chips, sources familiar with the situation said. Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.
Gentlemen, start your cross-compilers!
Updated 6/6. (at bottom)
(Of course, the Darwin core and xnu kernel already run on x86, any day of the week, so it’s a matter of recompiling, you know, everything else.) Developers will likely be forced to ship fat binaries again, doubling their executable size to include PPC and x86 object code. Anything else (separate architecture downloads, for example) wouldn’t be very Grandma-compatible.
Of course, this development demands that we reconsider the prospect of OSX-on-vanilla-PC-boxes. Are Apple’s margins getting too thin, even on high-end, high-taste-cost hardware? If so, let Dell deal with the pedestrian, low business of making hardware, and leave the aethereal software concerns to Apple, I suppose. Of course, in the PC world, hardware peripherals don’t “just work??? anymore, and one of Apple’s biggest selling points has always been the “just work??? factor. (Also, didn’t we just say that Steve hated the clone thing?) Maybe the big secret here is that Apple is no longer dependent upon its Mac hardware sales margins for survival. (That’s what the iPod is for!)
Sorry for the rambling. I bet we’ll see some more insightful analysis from Mr. Gruber shortly. (Especially since, you know, he just got through saying how there is no way in Heckintosh this would transpire.)
Update 6/6: John Gruber’s take is still highly skeptical, writing the whole thing off as a PR stunt, but includes the following:
Especially if it turns out that Intel is producing PowerPC chips — this way Jobs still has a huge surprise to announce, but CNet’s article is still accurate, because Apple would be switching to “Intel chips???.
Hey, that would sort-of make sense, especially since the Xbox (and, you know, everything else that’s not a PC) will start to incorporate PowerPC-architecture chips soon.