Well, it's official -- Jobs announced at the WWDC today that the Mac will be fully migrated to the Intel platform over the next two years. IBM just plain couldn't build PPCs that were cool enough. (There will never, apparently, be a Powerbook G5.)
He says OS X has been developed internally on both Intel and PPC from day one -- Jobs is apparently running the demo on an Intel box running Tiger.
The official press release is here. This is gona piss off the developers big time, I imagine (ENDIAN ISSUES!), but Apple couldn't live on the G4 forever in its notebooks.
The next two years should be VERY interesting. I'd expect sales of PPC-based Macs to tank heavily after today...
Ryan
Apple to Intel
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Rspaight
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Apple to Intel
Last edited by Rspaight on Mon Jun 06, 2005 2:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
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lukpac
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Interesting. The question remains if things will run on *any* x86 hardware, or only on special Apple hardware (just as you can't run MacOS on just any PowerPC/68k hardware).
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD
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Rspaight
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From what I'm reading, he keeps talking about "Intel-based Macs," so I'd suspect they'd have some custom chipset/firmware...
I can't imagine Apple would want the headache of supporting all the weirdo mobos and chipsets out there. That's one of their big selling points, frankly -- that the hardware and software are designed tightly together. Moving to an Intel processor wouldn't change that, but supporting the universe of "Wintel" boxes would.
Ryan
I can't imagine Apple would want the headache of supporting all the weirdo mobos and chipsets out there. That's one of their big selling points, frankly -- that the hardware and software are designed tightly together. Moving to an Intel processor wouldn't change that, but supporting the universe of "Wintel" boxes would.
Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
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Rspaight
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Interesting... Jobs is hyping "universal binaries" that run on either platform. Microsoft and Adobe are promising these for Office/PhotoShop/etc..
He says Mathematica was ported in 2 hours, with a grand total of 20 lines changed.
Ryan
He says Mathematica was ported in 2 hours, with a grand total of 20 lines changed.
Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
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Rspaight
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OS X 10.5 will be "Leopard." It is targeted for the end of 2006 (same time frame as Longhorn). So the first batch of Intel Macs will ship with Tiger (probably Mac mini and notebooks), then the rest after Leopard (probably iMac and PowerMac).
Ryan
Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
Re: Apple to Intel
Rspaight wrote:
The next two years should be VERY interesting. I'd expect sales of PPC-based Macs to tank heavily after today...
And that can only mean one thing....SALES! I want a Mac for recording purposes, so I'd be happy if they started remaindering the rest of the Power Macs...
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lukpac
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Rspaight wrote:Interesting... Jobs is hyping "universal binaries" that run on either platform. Microsoft and Adobe are promising these for Office/PhotoShop/etc..
I believe those would be the same as the old "FAT" binaries that contained native code for both 68k and PowerPC.
And while not exactly the same, it's along the lines of Carbon apps that run under both OS 9 and OS X.
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD