Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I watched yesterday with a bit of surprise as Steve announced Apple’s transition to Intel processors. Such a transition is a rumor that has popped up repeatedly for years now with no factual basis, and even this year’s iteration was based upon hearsay and included no specifics nor named any reliable source.

Those of us who doubted the rumors had good reason to.
As outsiders to the Apple campus, we have no idea what kinds of things Apple has on the drawing boards and what types of processors match Apple’s vision for the future. Steve stated in his keynote yesterday that the power-consumption-to-performance ratio of PowerPC chips simply did not match what Apple needs for the future, and Intel’s chips do. That’s simply something we didn’t know.

Secondly, I don’t think most people outside of Apple understood the extent to which Apple had been developing software for Intel processors. Marklar, a version of OS X that runs on Intel processors, and has existed since OS X’s inception, had been whispered about for a while, but there was nothing conclusive to confirm its existence. Also, I don’t remember reading any information about Apple application software being developed for PPC and Intel in parallel as requirement. Those of us not in-the-know had to guess how Apple would handle transitioning software from PPC to Intel, and it turns out that no transition is required. That’s a huge obstacle out of the way. Apple, it turns out, is so far along in its transition to Intel that Xcode and Intel-based Macs are available for developers practically immediately.

Now that a transition to Intel is a concrete reality, what does it mean to me as a user, admin, and all-around technical geek? Well, not a damn thing, frankly. All the things that make a Mac what it is are still there. OS X is still OS X. Great software for the Mac platform is still great software. Apple still maintains the same control over the whole widget that makes the product work so smoothly. Nothing is required of me as a user to make the transition. The PPC hardware I’ve invested in will be supported well beyond its usefulness to me personally. (Do you doubt that? Macs as old as 7 or 8 years are still supported by the latest OS release. There’s no reason to believe such a standard of support will change.) My current PowerBook isn’t any more or less obsolete than it was a week ago. Users lose nothing, and in the long term, the platform gains from the elimination of the CPU supply and roadmap problems brought on by Motorola and IBM.

I’m not a developer, so I can’t speak to what the next two years will be like for them. Steve made compiling apps for Intel look very easy, but developers in the trenches will be the real test of how easy it is. I have concerns about developer stagnation as their focus shifts from improving PPC apps to adjustments for universal binary compilations, but it’s all speculation. Perhaps I’ll post more about this if it happens.

I also don’t feel completely qualified to put my thoughts about any business ramifications into writing. I have my own opinions, but again, no evidence to support them yet. Will sales slow for Macs rolling off the assembly line right now that are perceived to already be “old”? Will potential buyers hold off purchases until the machine of their choice goes Intel? What products does Apple have in the pipeline that will make PPC products compelling for the next two years? What happens to the resale prices of PPC Macs for sale on, for instance, ebay?

I have a lot of thoughts beyond what I’ve been able to write here, but they all share a common theme: The next two years are going to be interesting to watch, and the next 5 years are going to be exciting in terms of innovative products. I look forward to it.