Well the rumors were going around for a while now. Scoble wrote about it a few days ago. Finally it is out. Apple is ditching IBM’s PowerPC processor and moving to Intel’s x86 processors. The move will take two years to complete.
Steve Jobs announced this at Worldwide Developer Conference 2005. His presentation was run on a Intel processor running MacOS X. Cool. The big secret was that Apple had a version of MacOS X running on Intel for five years. Hmmm… Their Plan B?
It seems FAT binaries from NextStep will be back. These are binaries that can run on both PPC and Intel architectures. Porting applications is also a breeze according to Steve.
The big question is will I be able to buy MacOSX and run it on my current laptop? I guess not as I am sure Apple would not want to control the hardware and not want to get into the driver hell Linux is in at the moment.
Update: A couple of bits I found over at scripting.com, interesting. Good that I did not impulse buy the 12″ iBook a week ago.
Now I can wait and get a Intel inside PowerBook and run windows on it too…
1. Apple is not going into the software business, their operating system will not run on other vendor’s hardware. So you won’t be running the Mac OS on Dell, HP or IBM, for example.
2. While Windows is not explicitly supported, they won’t do anything to prevent Windows from running on their hardware.
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