I've been trying to digest Steve Jobs' WWDC bombshell
announcement that Apple will be making a shift from PowerPC to
Intel processors - and to draw a bead on how I feel about it.
I wasn't completely surprised by the announcement. The Wall
Street Journal is not a rumor site, and it reported several
weeks ago that Apple was having talks with Intel. When CNET broke a
news story on Saturday explicitly predicting Jobs' Monday keynote
revelation, I figured that there was too much smoke for there not
to be some serious fire generating it.
Forward into the Past
It is now manifest that shifting the Macintosh platform to Intel
was probably in the back of Steve Jobs' mind from the time of his
comeback to Apple in 1997. After all, NeXTstep, Jobs' Unix-based
operating system from whence OS X sprang, had already been
engineered to run on Intel machines.
Indeed, Jobs revealed on Monday that Apple has been quietly
developing "shadow" builds of each OS version to support Intel
chips. "Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life the
past five years," quoth Jobs.
While the full ramifications of this watershed development will
take weeks and months to filter out, I think I'm generally okay
with it. If Intel's hardware is the best tool for the job - and
there are a number of pragmatic reasons why it is - then go for it.
Whatever it takes to make the Mac a stronger player in the
marketplace and a better computer for users is fine by me.
For the past several years, the PowerPC has been lagging
seriously behind Intel in clock speed, and that couldn't be allowed
to continue. Jobs said that Mac sales have been growing lately by
40% year-over-year, presumably attributable in large part to the
much-hyped "iPod halo" effect attracting new members to the Mac
community, but the megahertz deficit would inevitably slow that
promising momentum if it couldn't be overcome, one way or
another.
Jobs has, wisely we hope, chosen another.
Who knows? If IBM had been able to deliver on Steve Jobs'
promise of 3 GHz G5s within a year of the initial G5
introduction and/or it had been able to engineer a low power G5
chip that would work tolerably well in a PowerBook, Jobs might have
stayed the PowerPC course. However, IBM's inability to do either,
at least in a timely fashion, made switching to "Plan B" more and
more inevitable.
There are still many questions that remain to be answered. At
this extreme early point, it seems that a new emulation environment
called "Rosetta", incorporating "dynamic binary translation",
will
allow users to continue running their legacy Mac programs on the
new "Intel inside" Macs, much as Mac veterans were able to continue
using 68k apps on PowerPC machines (and some of us are still doing
so even under OS X Tiger, thanks to Classic Mode) with the
fast and transparent-to-the-user 680x0 emulation available on
PowerPC Macs.
Speaking of which, I expect that the Intel transition will be
the final nail in OS 9's coffin, as its highly doubtful that
Apple would allocate expensive and time-consuming development
resources to making Classic work on Intel.
On the other hand, some OS X technology, such as Java-based
Dashboard, can be moved to Intel with little or no rewriting
required, and a new version of Apple's Xcode developer's tools will
allow developers to build "universal binaries", ( analogous to the
so-called "fat" binary applications for the Mac OS in the mid-90s
that had both 680x0 and PowerPC code) that can run on both PowerPC
and Intel processors, with both Carbon and Cocoa apps updatable
with minor modifications and a recompile.
OS X Still Mac Only
No, this does not mean you'll be able to run the Mac OS on a
cheap Windows PC box. Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller was
quoted yesterday: "We will not allow running Mac OS X on
anything other than an Apple Mac." However, you may be able to run
Windows on your entire Mac if you really want to.
Schiller noted that while Apple has no plans to sell or support
Windows on Intel-based Macs, "That doesn't preclude someone from
running it on a Mac. They probably will. We won't do anything to
preclude that."
However, the next year or two promises to be a bit of an awkward
transition period. I imagine that some folks will scramble to pick
up the last "real" PowerPC Macs, but a substantial number will
question whether they want to make a major investment in what is
about to become orphaned technology, however emphatic Apple's
assurances are that PowerPC machines will continue to be supported
for the foreseeable future.
I don't doubt that OS X 10.5 Leopard will run on PowerPC Mac, at
least with a basic set of features supported, but beyond that all
bets are off. It will be Interesting to watch how this plays out in
the marketplace.
From a historical perspective, everyone knew back in 2003 that
PowerPC was going to replace 68k, yet Mac sales did not collapse -
but that was a less radical revolution that Macs moving to Intel,
and the shock was softened somewhat by the promise of PowerPC
upgradability for some Mac models.
That will not apply this time.
I expect that Mr. Jobs has weighed the pros and cons and
determined that some short to medium term pain will be justified by
a long term gain.
Personally, my system upgrade roadmap has been thrown for a
loop, and I will have to decide whether it makes more sense to make
a move now or try to hold out with my present (considerably short
of cutting-edge) equipment for another year or more until the new
Intel-based hardware becomes available.
However, my suspicion is that once the new "Intel inside" Macs
hit the streets in 2006, PowerPC Macs will quickly feel as much
like yesterday's news as 68k ones did back in 95/96. It all depends
on how you define and perceive low-end computing.
In any case, we are now living in interesting times.
