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Apple Switching to Intel

Posted by pudge on Mon Jun 06, 2005 12:54 PM
from the but-but-but-but dept.
Businesses Intel OS X Operating Systems Apple
Steve Jobs announced at the WWDC keynote today that Apple is switching to Intel processors. MacNN has live coverage. The bottom line is that Mac OS X for the last five years has been running on Intel, the switch is expected to be complete in two years, and Rosetta will allow PPC apps to run on Intel-based Macs, transparently. If you're using Xcode, it is small changes and a recompile; otherwise, you might be seeing a lot of work ahead of you. You will be able to order the 10.4.1 preview for Intel today.
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  • where's the lawsuit against c|net? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by professorhojo (686761) * on Monday June 06 2005, @12:55PM (#12737897)
    Late Friday afternoon, C|Net News [com.com] published an extremely valuable trade secret about Apple [apple.com] and Intel [intel.com], days before Apple was scheduled to announce it ( Apple to Ditch IBM, Switch to Intel Chips [com.com] ). So, where's the friggin' lawsuit [eff.org] against C|Net to find out who leaked? Where is the judge who is going to claim that what C|Net published was "stolen property"?

    From: http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/2005/06 /05/apple_intel_wheres_the_lawsuit_against_cnet.ph p [corante.com]

    • Perhaps they wanted it... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sterno (16320) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:07PM (#12738168) Homepage
      All of this would assume that they wanted the information kept secret. I have little doubt that if news.com was publishing this information, Apple didn't have that big of an interest in keeping it secret. With individual product releases, they are quite a bit more protective because they want to control how the products are treated in the media.

      A good example of how this can work, if information came out on the shuffle well in advance of release, you'd see lots of reviews picking it apart for it's lack of a display, etc. So, before it ever hit the streets there would be a certain image of the device that could hurt their sales. But when Apple released it, they managed to spin the lack of display as a sort of feature. That the shuffle is about random playing, not picking songs out of a large library.

      As far as this change goes, it doesn't really need to be handled in any particular way. They needed to keep it officially secret as a publicly traded company, but practically speaking I don't think they really cared. Ultimately the people most effected by it, ISV's, seem to have had some awareness ahead of time under NDA's (at least the bigger ones).

      The end users of macs, for the most part, won't even understand what this means, or care. As long as the next mac they buy runs the software they have now and works as well as what they have now, they won't care.

    • Apple welcomed this leak (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GPS Pilot (3683) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:55PM (#12738833)
      C|Net's article created fantastic media buzz for Apple. I'm betting that ten times as many people followed today's keynote address than otherwise would have. This allowed Steve to explain the transition in the best possible light, to a huge audience. And I do think he did a great job of putting a positive spin on this, with the CEO of Intel and the cofounder of Wolfram Research as eloquent guest speakers.

  • Um (Score:5, Funny)

    by suso (153703) * on Monday June 06 2005, @12:56PM (#12737910) Homepage Journal
    Are you sure [y/N]?

  • So here it is (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ignorant Aardvark (632408) <cydeweysNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday June 06 2005, @12:56PM (#12737924) Homepage Journal
    My prediction of when you'll be able to run Mac OS X on an x86 machine is still: never. Apple isn't a software company. They're a hardware company. Just because they're changing their processor does not mean you're going to be able to run it on your hardware.

      • Re:So here it is (Score:5, Informative)

        by Queer Boy (451309) * <dragon.76@nOSpaM.mac.com> on Monday June 06 2005, @01:45PM (#12738702)
        Is apple going to sell prototypes of Apple Intel systems to any developer who wants to test their app?

        Yes, you should have read all the keynote transcripts. They did the same thing when the PowerPC came out, developers were given prototype 6100s as part of their developer kit.

      • Re:So here it is (Score:5, Informative)

        by MustardMan (52102) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:48PM (#12738743)
        As others have pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the dev kit includes the hardware. They aren't just shipping a Tiger CD you pop into your dell.

        • Re:So here it is (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sjf (3790) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:59PM (#12738875)
          As a mac user who bought a single-processor G5 a month before Apple dropped it from their line, and a 2nd Gen. iPod two months before they released the 3rd Gen, this for me is the last straw.

          Aww. That must have sucked. I presume both those devices just upped and died the moment they were outdated by superior technology ? That's why I never buy any technology that is in danger of being improved: you should see my mousetrap !

          Once my current G5 has outlived it's useful life, I'm unlikely to buy Apple again.

          I'm sorry I don't understand: I thought Apple had bilked you by 'dropping [it] from their line.' You say it still has a useful life ?

  • Not that big of a surprise (Score:5, Funny)

    by stlhawkeye (868951) on Monday June 06 2005, @12:57PM (#12737931) Homepage Journal
    Let's see, first I said, about 4 years ago, "There will be a color iPod soon." And everybody told me, "No way, that'd be stupid and pointless." The translation from Defensivegeek into English is, "I hope not, or I won't have the coolest, latest toy any more to lord over my friends!"

    I also have been agreeing with the industry analysts who said Apple would be running on Intel chips before long, and I've been vindicated.

    Now, if my prediction that Microsoft will have a Linux or other UNIX-like kernel in Windows by 2015 holds up I'll consider myself the Nostradomus of IT.

  • Dave Thorup, eat your hat! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 06 2005, @12:58PM (#12737975)
    Somebody send this guy [slashdot.org] some Worcestershire sauce. I hear it goes well with felt.

  • Apple getting out of hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by toupsie (88295) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:04PM (#12738110) Homepage
    Now that Apple has announced that it is moved to Intel, who is going to buy a G5 now? I am sure as hell not. Apple just killed the sales of its hardware for the rest of the year. Also does this mean I will be able to buy a Dell PowerEdge 2850 running Mac OSX Server?

  • Yeah, nice, but ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nice2Cats (557310) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:05PM (#12738133)
    ...did he say anything about a two-button mouse?
  • Oh this is so exciting.

    Over the years, I've made a ton of bets with Mac fans who swore up and down that Apple would never, ever switch to Intel processors.

    I am now owed several kegs of beer and some free fancy dinners. A couple people owe me a million bucks.

    Business strategy:

    1. Make wagers with Apple people.
    2. ...
    3. Profit! Steve Jobs will make the announcement for you.

  • Apple Computer - WORLD CLASS MANAGEMENT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Mutant (167716) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:27PM (#12738488) Homepage
    Folks, you can argue the technical pros and cons back and forth until you're sick in the face, but one thing lept out at me from Steve Jobs' presentation :

    "Mac OS X has been "leading a secret double life" for the past five years, said Jobs. "So today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel. This has been going on for the last five years."

    Damn. This is forward looking, hedge all your bets corporate Management. World class Management.

    I don't know if this thing will succeed or fail, but just parsing that statement above shows me that Jobs and Apple Computer will continue to evaluate all possible options at all possible times.

    This is one well run company.

  • This is good, here's why. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by illtron (722358) on Monday June 06 2005, @02:06PM (#12738964) Homepage Journal
    I've figured it out. You may be wondering what the hell Apple's reasoning is when IBM has some very promising things in the pipeline. Well I know. The MHz myth is now dead. Even if Macs could be X% faster than PCs by using IBM chips, it's a gamble. If Apple is ahead, eventually they'll be behind, and the cycle will repeat itself. The whole argument is now a moot point. Macs will always be THE SAME SPEED as PCs (give or take a small bit at any given time) from now on. If IBM pulls out ahead in the speed race, it won't matter, because Windows PCs don't use IBM chips, and they never will. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. A guaranteed tie is better than gambling on a possible loss or a very, very minor win at best. There's also a secondary benefit: If the hardware business becomes unprofitable, Apple can always become a software company at a moment's notice. And it looks like Apple's going to make this easy enough for both end users and developers. I see all of this as good news and welcome our new Intel overlords.

    • Yeah, except now you can have a fast mobile (Score:5, Insightful)

      by xtal (49134) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:00PM (#12738022) Homepage
      The powerbooks weren't cutting it and there was NO WAY to get a G5 in there.

      Maybe I can get back to a 4-5hr runtime like the first generation Tibook had..

    • Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pomo monster (873962) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:03PM (#12738095)
      Sticking with the Mac would be annoying and difficult because of compatibility headaches, so you're switching to Linux?

    • Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Senjutsu (614542) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:09PM (#12738198)
      And this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers.

      No, this is bullshit. There's an extremely viable benefit to consumers: Apple will still be relevant in three years.

      Why do you think Apple is doing this? It's not for shits and giggles. Those mobile G5s everyone's been waiting for, the one's that were going to save Apple's portable line from irrelevancy? It should be pretty obvious at this point that IBM has told Apple they aren't coming. Freescale dropped the ball, the G4 line is miles behind the times and Freescale lacks the ability to bring it up to date.

      "Consumers don't benefit"? Bullshit. Consumers benefit because this is the only way Apple can keep their portables competitive. Laptops are the fastest growing segment of the market place, and Apple finally hitting 2Ghz with a G4 and its you've-got-to-be-shitting-me slow bus sometime next year wasn't going to cut it. Laptop sales fall, software makers lose interest, Apple fails, Apple's customers lose.

      I'd rather they bet it all on a transition to keep the company relevant, rather than keep Freescale's incompetency and IBM's disinterest in laptop-suitable engineering as an anchor to hold them back in the market place until sheer inevitability kills the platform.

    • Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Redshift (7411) * on Monday June 06 2005, @01:22PM (#12738416)
      1. If Rosetta works as well as demonstrated (Jobs showed unmodified PPC versions of Photoshop+filters and MS Office running happily and fast on the Intel Mac box) then this will be less painful than you think.

      2. The way the Intel and PowerPC raodmaps are going I think in three uears time there will be a HUGE difference in capability. Jobs was demoing a Pentium 3.6GHz quad for God's sake!

    • Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by mangu (126918) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:35PM (#12738590)
      so long as you weren't using any Altivec-heavy apps (since SSE is a poor replacement)


      Do you have any evidence to back this assertion? Generally speaking, Altivec in the G5 has the same function and performance as SSE2 in the Pentium 4. I use floating point functions that I have developed and coded in assembly language myself, and I don't see any difference between Altivec and SSE2 at the fundamental level.


      Most of the derogatory comments by Apple users about the supposed shortcomings of SSE2 are ill informed, they seem to confuse SSE2 with MMX. Optimization for either the Altivec or SSE2 is a complex subject. First, one has to find an algorithm that works well for vector operations, which means making sure that add and multiply operations will overlap correctly. Then one has to adapt that algorithm for the cache size, CPU clock, and memory bus cycle times. The main problem here is to avoid starving the cache. One has to balance how many operations are done by the CPU for each byte that comes from/to RAM and make sure that the timing is right. All these factors vary a lot between different CPU, mobo, and RAM models. To state that Altivec is either better or worse than SSE2 is simplistic, they are functionally identical and the relative performance between them will be determined by secondary factors.


      The biggest problem in SSE2 is that the only compiler that optimizes it well is Intel's, gcc sucks when generating code for the P4, but with hand-optimized code this is irrelevant. If the Intel architecture that Apple will adopt has SSE2, this could be very good news for developers. Let's hope Apple implements efficient optimization for SSE2.

    • 68K to PPC transition wasn't so bad (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tgibbs (83782) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:46PM (#12738721)
      Actually, I found that the 68K to PPC transition went pretty smoothly. Virtually everything still ran. On the first generation of PowerPC's, 68K applications ran perceptibly slower, but not by much--about like having a 68030 instead of a 68040. By the second generation, even the 68K applications were faster than on 68040.

      And it is likely that this transition will probably go even more smoothly: Early versions of the PPC MacOS still were running a lot of 68K OS code in emulation; it is a safe bet that the Intel OS X will be 100% native code. And there is less hand-tweaked assembly code running around, so it will be easier for developers to simply recompile. Most major applications are already cross-platform, so developers already know what to tweak to enhance Intel processor performance.

      My guess is that the transition will be smoother than the PPC transition, and much smoother than the OS X transition.

      Financially, this is going to be a big bump for Apple. I'm certainly not going to order any more new Macs until the Intel systems are available. This may be one reason why they chose to do it now, when the success of the iPod will carry them through.

      It may be the best decision for Apple, but I still think that it would have been better if they'd been able to reach a deal with IBM to develop the PPC further. I would much rather have seen multicore PPC's.

      The question of whether the Intel OS X will run on generic Intel hardware seems to still be open. I'd guess not, but then I didn't believe that they'd switch to Intel in the first place.

      • Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by aktbar (22510) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:18PM (#12738339)
        Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed. Vmware will run on a mac. ...

        WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.

        And WINE/VirtualPC running so well may be the biggest disaster for MacOS -- why should Microsoft continue to support MSOffice/Mac when you can just run the Windows version in WINE? Why should Adobe build Acrobat for MacOS, when the Windows version (runs just as fast in WINE!) has more features and costs less??

        Good Windows emulation is probably what killed OS/2, it can kill OS X too...

      • Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mcc (14761) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Monday June 06 2005, @01:34PM (#12738576) Homepage
        Dude, do you even know what "recompiling" means? Your entire post is nonsense.

        Linux apps are ALREADY recompilable and compatible for mac. All of them, just about. There were only problems when OS X beta first hit, and that was mostly because people had been writing their Makefiles poorly.

        Modern computer software is almost never CPU-tied. The only problem is you have to recompile to run on different CPUs, which means you have to have source code. Linux apps, conveniently, you usually do, meaning transitioning between CPU archs as a linux user is effortless in a way it will not be for OS X users. The only problem with linux /unix software on OS X is that GUI apps don't share quite the same API, which means they have to be run in an X server app, which is sort of kind of like wine, only 100% compatible and 100% ugly.

        This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.

        I assure you, no. The reasons inkscape is broken on my mac have nothing whatsoever to do with processors. I don't know what the holdup on openoffice 2.0 is, but I think it's less to do with chips and more to do with APIs. If there's some incompatibility between OO2 and Apple X11 I'm sure it would be fixed by now if someone felt like using a word processor inside the X11 battlemech were worth it.

        What you're saying is kind of like "no more second-class windows versions of popular OS apps" because Cygwin exists there.

        WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.

        That does have interesting implications. But it's going to require a LOT of work to make that work, above and beyond what Wine's already doing. Wine will have to be practically rewritten for cocoa. Otherwise we'll be running the partially-incompatible wine translation layer inside the compatible-but-awkward X11 translation layer. Eww. I don't really expect wine for os x to get to the point your average person can run it for a long time, and I don't expect it to really work ever unless Apple themselves decide to put some work into it.

        And Wine doesn't mean much to me personally. Again, great for Apple, great for switchers, not so much for anyone who's already invested in the mac. Windows apps are half the reason windows isn't worth using. The only thing it's really got worth keeping are games, and well, not only are those what Wine is worst at, that's what that little multicolored box plugged into my TV is for.

        • Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by WhiteWolf666 (145211) <moornblade at gmail.com> on Monday June 06 2005, @02:08PM (#12738986) Homepage Journal
          Regarding OO.org, theres plenty of architecture specific code in OO.org that had to be re-written for OS X. That's why the 1.0 port took so long. I'm not talking about NeoOffice/J, by the way, I'm talking about the X11 port. That's why the Mac X11 OO.org port alpha is 6 months overdue *so far*.While running under X11 is less than ideal, it'll still work nicely.

          NeoOffice/J hasn't even started working on OO.org 2.0.

          I understand the problems associated with an aqua port. Even without aqua, there are quite a few apps which make poor assumptions about the architecture they are running on, and quite a few libraries which use code that won't compile on a mac. I'm talking about just running stuff normalish linux apps on X11 on your Mac.

          Not everything is a portable as you make it out to be. Plenty of programmers make poor assumptions when writing their software, including the sun guys who wrote the original star office codebase.

          Oh, and Fullscreen opengl works great on the Mac's X11 implementation right now. I doubt that we'll see that go away on Mac OS X x86.

          Why *shouldn't* wine work? We don't know the specifics of the OS yet, but Wine works on Freebsd. Transgaming believes that Cedega can be shoehorned onto Freebsd.

          And cedega, if you haven't tried it, is fantastic for running Windows Games on Linux. Not 100%, mind you, but it handles a lot of games extremely well. In some cases, with better-than-windows performance.

          Freebsd->Darwin isn't really that big of a jump, if you are talking about x86. Running Half-Life 2, even under X11, even under Cedega, could be quite a big selling point.

      • Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by soupdevil (587476) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:20PM (#12738382)
        The transition was so difficult for the audio and video industry, that for many people it STILL hasn't happened. You can find workhorse macs running OS9 in nearly every recording studio and post production house in LA.

    • Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Otter (3800) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:01PM (#12738042) Journal
      No time for that now! I have to work up my new explanation of why CISC is better than RISC, MMX is better than AltiVec and only an idiot would ever think otherwise!

      • Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Golias (176380) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:11PM (#12738222)
        You have plenty of time. The rumors were only half-true.

        Apple is adopting Intel, but is not "ditching" IBM.

        New G5 towers will still be around for at least another year, and probably at least two. Intel is probably going to start by replacing the G4 CPUs in Powerbooks and minis.

        At the Stevenote, he informed devs that they would be supporting both platforms for a long time to come.

          • Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Golias (176380) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:55PM (#12738832)
            Hey, PowerPC was (and still is, really) a great platform concept.

            But people don't buy computers for the concept. The x86 world beat out the PPC world when it comes to consumer chips by simply doing a better job of implementation. While IBM was promising 3 GHz performance that they couldn't deliver, Intel was cranking out a new chip which offers more performance per Watt on laptops than the "insanely great" G4.

            x86 didn't look like it had a hell of a lot of potential three years ago, but AMD and Intel kept pounding. A good old "three yards and a cloud of dust" attack won the game.

      • Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)

        by m50d (797211) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:20PM (#12738373) Homepage Journal
        I felt something, a disturbance in the network, as if a million mac zealots cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced

        Sorry, just seemed appropriate.

      • Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by doktor-hladnjak (650513) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:33PM (#12738570)
        It doesn't shock me too much that it only took 2 hours to port Mathematica. I mean, the API for OS X on Intel is probably exactly the same as for OS X on PPC. Probably only very, very small parts (if any at all) of Mathematica are written in assembly code. You fix those parts and anything that relies on specific processor behavior then do a recompile.

        Apple has obviously got an x86 gcc for Tiger and has already begun the process of porting the frameworks, most of which will probably not require massive porting effort. Frameworks like vecLib will probably require some more work to use SSE instead of Altivec though.

        Even the concerns about things like endianness are not really a problem so long as the code was written the right way in the first place.

      • Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by forkazoo (138186) <wrosecrans AT gmail DOT com> on Monday June 06 2005, @01:49PM (#12738755) Homepage
        Indeed, this will be a huge blow to Apple marketing. The PowerPC chips have always had some interesting feature, or excelled at some particular benchmark. Maybe they were faster, maybe they were slower. That's not the point. It was always possible to benchmark some obscure x86 worst case scenario to "prove" that they were selling the fastest computer in the world, ever.

        Now, they will have negligible margins on Dell in the benchmarks. If they go a sane route and stay with OpenBoot or similar, they will still need video cards that don't depend on ugly PC BIOS, so they are still unlikely to be kings of 3D.

        I understand the technical issues, but I would be surprised if IBM wasn't able to clean up their act with all the PPC chips they will be moving for embedded systems (game consoles as well as misc. other)

        Color me worried.

      • Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by FeloniousPunk (591389) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:55PM (#12738834)
        I freely and publically admit to being one of the people who said that no way would Apple be that stupid. I was wrong- Apple was that stupid.

        When Apple does not die as a result of this, I trust that at some point you'll be as open and honest as you are now and admit that in retrospect it was you who were that stupid, and not Apple.

      • Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by adamjaskie (310474) on Monday June 06 2005, @02:05PM (#12738950) Homepage
        This will kill Apple.

        Why? The Apple fans that buy Macs because they have OMG PPC970 will be chased away, sure. But not the ones that buy Macs because they are Macs. As long as it runs OSX and Photoshop, looks pretty sitting on their desk, and Steve Jobs said "Hey, you know, this is pretty good!" they are sold. The fact that they will most likely cost significantly less will be an added bonus for them, and likely attract even more customers than the switch chased away. People will likely not buy Dells, only to load them with OSX, because people generally use their computer the way it came until it dies. If someone wants OSX, they will buy an Apple, just like they do now.

        And nothing has been said yet on if you WOULD be able to load it on any Dell or Gateway system. It could very well need some proprietary Mac hardware to run on. The CPU may be the core of the computer, but there are other things, too, such as the chipset and BIOS that could be Apple-exclusive.

        I fail to see how this can have a SIGNIFICANT impact to Apple's install-base in the short term, and only see good things in the long term.

    • Re:Holy crap. (Score:5, Informative)

      by cosmo7 (325616) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:01PM (#12738056) Homepage
      Here's Apple's press release [apple.com].

      Dispel any remaining doubts; we are now living in the evil mirror universe.

    • In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)

      by zephc (225327) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:11PM (#12738235)
      Macs run on Intel and Microsoft uses PowerPC! What a country!

    • It makes sense though... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Om (5281) * on Monday June 06 2005, @01:18PM (#12738345)

      Think about it. We don't have a G5 Powerbook because we hear about the massive heat issues. Hell, just recently, I am having to take back my recently aquired G4 Powerbook because they are catching on bloody fire.

      Secondly, I understand that Adobe is not making Photoshop and their other products for the Mac *first*. They are going to the PC, and then the Mac.

      I mean, this quote says it all:

      "I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven't been able to deliver that to you," said Jobs. "But as we look ahead, and though we've got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can't envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap,"

      So they go Intel. Who cares? Most of us are using Linux on x86, and we couldn't care less. The only thing that alarmed me was that they didn't choose AMD64, but thats just me. Hopefully, this will influence developers to port their stuff over to OS X now (which would benifit Linux indirectly imo). So hopefully we'll get a ton more games (yay!... games are a wasteland on the Mac) and apps because of this switch.

      Things are abotu to get interesting now. Its like Jobs saying, "OK, Gates... lets fight in your ring."

      ++Om

    • Re:You know what this means, Power PC Apple Users? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Radon Knight (684275) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:01PM (#12738058)
      Possibly not - the new version of XCode builds universal binaries for both Intel and PPC. So, what's the problem again?

      • Re:You know what this means, Power PC Apple Users? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MrPerfekt (414248) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:56PM (#12738852) Homepage Journal
        Possibly not - the new version of XCode builds universal binaries for both Intel and PPC. So, what's the problem again?

        The problem is when some "smart" developer decides to save space on his binary by simply not compiling in PowerPC support because "his userbase doesn't have that significant of a percentage of PowerPC users anymore". That's fine and dandy to the majority of x86 Mac users, but what about those left with a perfectly good aging PowerPC system?

        They're suddenly unsupported and that's a horrible worthless feeling with nobody to blame it on except Apple for making, at worst, an arbitrary platform shift. At best, it's a failure of engineering which isn't terribly reassuring either.

    • Re:Paste from Macworld..read before flaming (Score:5, Informative)

      by Danathar (267989) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:05PM (#12738126) Journal
      Continued paste from Macworld...

      Rosetta keeps old apps running

      Jobs also discussed a new technology called Rosetta, that he described as "a dynamic binary translator." It runs existing PowerPC applications on the Intel platform, he said. Jobs described Rosetta as "lightweight," and said "it's nothing like Classic."

      Jobs demonstrated Rosetta by running Microsoft Office applications, Quicken and Photoshop CS 2 -- all unmodified PowerPC-binary versions, unlike Mathematica -- on the new Intel-based hardware.

      "So that is Rosetta, Jobs concluded. "These PowerPC apps just run. And that's what we're going to have for our users, because every app isn't going to be there for our users on day one."

      Microsoft's Roz Ho and Adobe's Bruce Chizen both took the stage to reaffirm their commitment to the Macintosh platform. Ho said that Microsoft has been "working with Apple for some time" to create future versions of Office using Apple's Xcode tools, and will create universal binaries accordingly." Chizen called Apple's decision to move to Intel "great," and gently chided Steve Jobs: "What took you so long?"

    • Overreacting surely? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Master Of Ninja (521917) on Monday June 06 2005, @01:50PM (#12738765)
      You so need to sit down and take a chill-pill. Being x86 will not make it easier to make viruses. That whole aspect will depend on the OS, and it is still OSX. And your friends computer is suddenly not going to stop working. The transition is not happening for a wee while yet, and so Apple will still support his system. They're even going to allow the production of dual platform binaries. You're just getting worked up over nothing. I just think you and your friend are zealots - mac on x86 may be good. They might even have the rights to licence altivec over to intel processors. Just chill...

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