intel rumour turns wild. C|net news.com says it's a done deal. Apple will use intel's chips in future Macs. Apple will do a full transition to intel's CPUs. Now while not totally out of the question, I personally think it'd be a bad move, since it means a lot of pain for the coming years. Apple has been in constant transition for more than a decade. First we went from 68K to PowerPC processors (and lived with an OS which was partly using the 68K emulator for main services until OS X arrived) and then we had the transition from classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, which has basically only just been done.
A move to intel hardware would mean two versions of the operating system. For quite a while, too, since G5 users certainly won't accept a stop of the PPC version of the operating system for some years to come. While Mac OS X is highly portable, keeping both versions current and well-performing is going to cost a lot of energy.
On the other hand: intel is pushing harder in many segments. And for portable computers, IBM is not currently delivering anything, really, and Motorola/FreeScale hasn't done much either. If Steve Jobs wants to sell this to us early next week, he has to do very, very good. Insanely great, he'd have to be. - posted by Patrick Armbruster @ 12:08 [article link]