Boy, were we wrong. In a previous Gearblog entry on 5/26/05 we wrote:
Ignore the talk of Apple considering using Intel chips instead of PowerPC processors. It just ain’t gonna happen.
Then yesterday Steve Jobs told the audience at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco that: “It turns out that the rumors were true.” What he was admitting is that the Macintosh will stop using IBM’s PowerPC chip and switch to Intel’s microprocessors.
Darn.
We have to hand it to the pundits who called this one correctly — we just didn’t think it would happen.
So, what could be the result? How about the Apple Macintosh becoming the desktop competition to Windows that people were hoping Linux could be? This could then open the way for other enterprise desktop alternatives to be considered such as yellowTAB‘s Zeta.
Obviously pricing will be a key issue but application availability shouldn’t: Apple has a porting tool that is supposed to make recompiling for the Intel platform as simple as checking a box labelled “Intel”. Developers will be muttering “Yeah, right!” but at the conference Apple had Wolfram Research stand up an claim that recompiling took them two hours!
This is going to be a fascinating story to watch as it unfolds and while predicting what Steve Jobs might do hasn’t proved to be something that we seem to be much good at, betting on what he says he’ll do is usually a safe bet.
