vaguelyaware.com

Yes, its official, today’s WWDC keynote marked an era for Apple as a company and a platform, there are plenty of news articles on what is happening, so I’ll let you read about it elsewhere, but everyone who knows I have a mac is calling me up saying “HEY! DID YOU HEAR?!!!” So I figure if I post my thoughts here, I can refer these people here. So here is the deal, after the architecture change back in the day from 68k to 604(PPC) and the evolution of PPC from there, and the beige to color movement that marked where OS9 could and OSX couldn’t, Apple knows about architecture changes, they also know they are generally bad. You get developers pissed, get hardware changes needed and need an OS rewrite. Well, good ol’ Steve has, I presume, had this up his sleeve for a little while.

I expect that Intel approached Apple with a rather large grin saying, look at what we have cooking. Steve looked, liked, and compared to the current problem with the PPC chip that is getting hotter and more power hungry. Apple knows their users are desperate for a G5book and the sales are suffering from that anticipation, the fact is, it can’t be done, not well anyway. Steve wants the next revision to his beautiful *Books to be done right. The only way to do that, is to get a fast, low power, cool chip. Meet Intel Mobile - low power, cool, quick. The answer to Steve’s problems. But really, this is merely speculation btw, but I don’t think SJ would jump on this unless it was really cool. So I’m expecting that Intel has a rather impressive chip up their sleeve that is really going to wow Apple fan-base into acceptance.

Other points to remember while freaking out about this.

• Apple’s OSX can and has been able to run on the x86 architecture (Intel) for years now • Tiger was shown at the keynote, running on an Apple, with an Intel chip • These machines are a reality, shipping to select developers (read: Adobe, Microsoft, etc.) already. • Converting existing cocoa apps, isn’t that much of a challenge, carbon a bit more work, but existing programs can be made to run, fairly easily on the new architecture and bundled with multiple binaries.•

Here is the real interesting part, the new Apple computers will be able to run Windows, so the last reason not to buy Apple hardware just left. I’m sure MS might be a bit more pressured to perform when Apple can say, “well try our OS which we bundle for free with the hardware, and if you don’t like it, you can load windows on to it.” Yes, nails on a chalkboard to most apple fans, but apple is a business, and that is financially a sound investment. People will then be able to try out, fall in love with OSX, and get hooked on apple hardware and software. No, OSX won’t run on a Dell, thank you SJ (I hate dell).

So overall, just another move in the right direction I think, since everything was ready and a rather easy conversion. Plus, I think Intel is going to have a bit of a surprise for us.