Thursday, June 09, 2005

Intel Macs??

Its disheartening to think that in about 12 month's time Apple will no longer be using its PowerPC chips and the slew of Intel based processors will be running the show. Apple has so far sold its products by design and performance, which was generated by the PowerPC chips. Its interesting to me that on their websites they do benchmark tests over their rival Intel-based CPUs and now they are switching instead.

At the WWDC 2005 Keynote address when this was announced. Silence.

Is this a good idea? Steve Jobs has a gift of foresight, and independant thinking. Perhaps we can't see it, or perhaps we are shutting off. But the real deal is that Apple has created a community, that some have labelled as a 'cult thing'. That could be true, and cults are pretty much fanatics. Worse if the lack sense of humor.

And talking about sense of humor, it was indeed funny that Jobs used an Intel-based CPU running OS X to do his presentation, and despite the initial shock of the Intel transition, it went pretty well, actually. The process of switching means that applications has to be recompiled in XCode, and with the latest version of XCode, it is possible to compile a universal binary that runs on both PowerPC and Intel processors.

Creating a universal binary may be simple for developers. But will it be enough to convince Mac loyals that it isn't really a big issue? My guess is with Apple's design and marketing team, that won't be a problem at all.