The Press release from Apple confirms it. Apple are moving over to use Intel chips. Probably the worst kept secret in mac fandom (well, it went from outside bet by most, to a dead certainty on Friday), but it makes a fair degree of sense if they’re not getting what they need and want out of the PowerPC platform.
That said, it’s surprising given the platform is ramping up with the XBox and such making use of it. But if they’re simply not getting what they want from IBM as a supplier of such a key component in terms of cost, responsiveness, strategy and so on, it makes sense.
I’m no PowerPC bigot by any means. I only see good things in the switch over to Intel, not least that it won’t be long before we see geeks moving OS X onto vanilla PC hardware rather than the no doubt proprietary Apple supplied kit. But competition will be good for all concerned (see Microsoft are quoted in the press release!), and I hope that - as The Register points out - we’ll be wondering what all the fuss was about in a few years time.
June 6th, 2005 at 7:13 pm
[...] From the horses Mouth: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html and my 2p’s: [...]