So the rumors ( and former press reports ) are true .

After 11 years , Apple will set about the process of ditching the PowerPC computer architecture and will instead build Macs based on processors base by Intel . This is a complicated topic that will probably occupy all of us for the next week , and to some extent the next class , while we sort out all the details .

The most authoritative thing is probably to set out disentangling the emotion of the situation from the cold , hard technological facts . Over the past years , Intel has been paint as the foe of the Macintosh . A wad of piece of work has been clothe — include by Apple , as Intel chief executive officer Paul Otellini read onstage today — into pick at Intel ’s marketing elbow grease and promote the PowerPC chip computer architecture .

For a farseeing clip Intel has been one half of the Mac community ’s own axis of rotation of immorality , WinTel , the Windows - Intel alinement that suffer for everything that was untimely with PCs and right with Macs . I have sex that when I went to Intel in 1993 for a Book of Job interview — thank goodness I took that job atMacUserinstead , huh ? — I felt a fiddling bit like a sleeper agent . Hidden in my backpack was a PowerBook 160 . I joked with one of my grad school professor at the time that I was waiting for the Intel sensors to detect a Motorola processor and shoot the Giant Intel Anti - Macintosh Laser Beam at me at any time .

So how creepy-crawly is it to see Intel and Apple working together ? A little spot , but not quite as creepy as it would have been a few eld ago . Times have changed , both in the Mac world and on the PC side . Intel is no longer a monolith when it comes to make believe PCs — AMD is punishing on their heels . Windows has taken its lumps on legion fronts , with serious protection problems coupled with an inability to transport Longhorn , Microsoft ’s next - generation Windows OS . Meanwhile , Apple kissed and made up with former enemy IBM , adopt a new operating system based on Unix , and even start releasing hardware and software system that works with Windows .

Now , get ’s step away from the emotion . Apple has chosen a new chip vendor . Why did it do it ? Steve Jobs himself pointed to two fundamental facts that anyone following the Mac for the past two yr will already know by affection : Two eld ago , Jobs promised a 3 - gigacycle per second Power Mac G5 , and it still does n’t exist ; and there are still no G5 - establish PowerBooks anywhere to be realise .

In describe the change to Intel , Jobs explained that as far as Apple is come to , Intel ’s product roadmap — the check they ’re give way to be developing over the next few years — is one that ’s much more favorable than the roadmap they interpret with the PowerPC scrap . Is that a compliment to Intel ’s chip - designing prowess , or a shot at IBM ’s want of power to amend the G5 and make it more appropriate for laptop economic consumption ? Yes to both , I ’d say .

When you get away from the emotion of this office , I think this passage is n’t move to be nearly as tumultuous as the one from 680×0 - crime syndicate processors to the PowerPC , or from oxygen 9 to OS X. Via “ Rosetta , ” PowerPC - compiled Mac apps will still run on Intel - based systems . And creating Intel - aboriginal version of Mac apps will bemucheasier than either making 680×0 apps PowerPC native or earn type O 9 apps prevail in OS X. The very bodily structure of OS X — which itself was designed , right smart back when it was NextStep / OpenStep , to compile formultipleprocessor architecture — run to keep developer writing their code at a very eminent horizontal surface , so that recompiling their program to run on Intel should be comparatively square .

In my mind , the big negative about this total transition is n’t the proficient or even the political . It ’s the side effect that ’s go to come from confusion and misinformation about this variety , especially in the next few days . abide tuned to Macworld.com for a lot more , and by all way spread the word to your friends : this does n’t mean that Apple ’s becoming a PC cloner . It does n’t mean that Macs will all run Windows instead of OS X. It does n’t entail that current Macs will be disused next year .

The sky is not fall .

But , I ’ll admit , it seems to be a slightly different shade than it was yesterday .