Apple throws in the towel and moves to Intel(Reply 3)
I have to admit to being surprised at this one - shellshocked even, and yet it's actually an obvious move.
Moving MAC from PPC to Intel doesn't make a lot of difference from a
software perspective, and I wouldn't be surprised if the move wasn't
discussed as part of the MacOS-X design criteria. MacOS-X runs on top
of a BSD derivative operating system. A lot of development of such
systems happens to happen on Intel Platforms. Further, much development
on such platforms also happens with the GCC compiler chain.
Moving everyone from Motorolla 68K to PPC was a huge upheaval, but now
that most developers have movedto the Gnu tool-chain, a further move to
Intel should simply be a recompile. That's the theory anyway. Most well
designed applications will indeed simply recompile and I think the
transition to Intel will be fairly painless.
I guess we get to wait-and-see!