* Analysis of Apple’s move to Intel processors
It’s official: Apple said last week it will dump IBM PowerPC and Freescale Semiconductor processors and start using Intel processors in its Macintosh computers.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the move last week at the company’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.
While Gene Munster, senior research analyst for Piper Jaffrey, says the decision is a positive one long-term, he says there are short-term disadvantages.
“There are clearly risks to transitioning to a different processor, with the most visible being the possible pushback by the developer community, as the move will require programmers to rewrite some applications,” says Munster in a research note published last week.
Long term, Munster says Apple will gain a consistent supply of processors, be able to bring Macs closer in price to competitive PCs and attract a larger community of developers who will write applications for the Intel-based Mac.
Users will see Macs running with Intel processors by the end of the second quarter next year. A complete transition to Intel will happen by the end of 2007.
Jobs calls the move to Intel a major transition for Apple. He cites two others – Apple’s move from Motorola 68000 processors to IBM’s PowerPC in the early 1990s and the company’s introduction of the Unix-like Mac OS X operating system in 2001.
Apple will offer software to help developers convert their Mac applications to run on Intel. Jobs says, however, that users shouldn’t hope to have Mac OS X run on other Intel platforms. The company’s developers have jiggered the operating system so that it will recognize non-Apple hardware.
The company will also ship a program call Rosetta to let PowerPC-based applications run on Intel-based Macs. This program will likely affect the performance of the machines running it.
Apple has been developing on Intel hardware for several years, says Jobs, who detailed parallel Intel/PowerPC development efforts at the company.
Jobs highlighted IBM’s inability to deliver processors that could run at 3 GHz and its inability to create a low-power chip for laptop computers as reasons for Apple’s move to Intel.
