Well, I was wrong...
June 06, 2005 @ 03:41 AMSteve Jobs as usual was able to blow away the audience, even in the face of rumors which had let out his secret several days in advance. My prediction was incorrect. They will be switching to standard Pentium chips.
A lot of rabid Mac users are furious at the moment. But they don’t get it. It’s Apple’s software and tight integration to their hardware that makes the Mac so great. That won’t change. The only thing that will change is Macs will be quite a bit faster (on par with anything Windows runs on), and by some estimates up to 25% cheaper. Not a bad thing at all.
And for all the dooms-dayers who thing Apple won’t survive this “horribly messy” transition, Jobs once again elegantly and back-handedly made his point. After demonstrating Tiger’s newest advanced features for the better part of 20 minutes, Jobs informed the audience that the entire demo and presentation was running on Intel processors. Audience Gasps... Brilliant, Jobs… brilliant.
This transition will sounds like it will be largely painless for the average user and only have minor consequences for software developers. The big developers - Adobe and Microsoft - have already committed to fully supporting the new platform… and smaller development shops are begin provided with tools that will create “universal binaries” capable of running on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs.
This entire transition is being helped thanks to Jobs’ insight. He confirmed that Mac OS X has been living a double life since it’s creation 5 years ago. Apple has maintained an Intel compatible build of every version of Mac OS X since the original.
AAPL’s midday free-fall has completely reversed itself, by the way.