Contributed by Staff June 12, 2005 1:59 AM

So, it'll be a week this Monday that Apple--read Jobs, announced the switch to Intel as its CPU provider. Before the announcement despite the bounty of rumors, I spent little time considering what the switch would mean. Now, that it's official I figure it's safe to speculate.

Actually, "speculate" is not the word. Rather, I have just come up with a few thoughts. I have not analyzed them and have not drawn any conclusions. They are just thoughts that occurred to me as I began to ponder what this move might mean for Apple and more importantly its users. Starting with the hope that Macs will not ship with the goofy "Intel inside" cattle branding. Motorola and IBM never felt the need to do this so I hope Apple resists any urging to do so.

When considering new hardware, the CPU makes little--if any, difference. Apple has a working version of Mac OS X and from a high level the CPU it runs on shouldn't mean anything so long as it just works. What this means for long-time Mac loyalists is that the romance of knowing that the guts of their machines are different than plain wrapper clones is gone. Even if those users didn't fully understand what that difference is. And that the stone throwing from using an architecture that has widely been praised as being superior to alternative designs was all for naught.

Of course there's no need to panic because Apple has made a CPU change before. In the mid '90s when Apple made the transition from the 68000 series of CPUs to PowerPCs is very similar to what is happening now. Apple provided a way to run legacy software on the new systems and claims to do the same with this switch too. The trouble here is that Apple will drop support for a technology as soon as it has had enough with it. For example, Mac OS X version 10.4 will not run on a system that does not have built-in FireWire support which excludes a number of PCs that currently run version 10.3 just fine. At least that's what Apple says though I have not heard a convincing reason for why. So my concern is in for how long Apple will support the software layer that will allow programs built for PPC chips to run on the new Intel hardware. If I were to guess right now, not more than a couple of years.

If this guess is close, then perhaps by version 10.6 (perhaps 10.7) I will not be able to upgrade and run perfectly fine software with the newer system. Which means that I'm into the upgrade for new software too. Perhaps my "if it ain't broken don't fix it" attitude is causing me unecessary stress.

Even if support for old software continues for a much longer time, what's to say Jobs won't change his undershorts one morning and decide to switch to yet another chip supplier, like IBM?

Then there's all sorts of speculation about whether Macs will be able to boot Windows and the other way around. Who's to say? But what about this? If one can buy into the idea that even if Mac OS X would run on most any PC (assume there will be a well defined list of hardware Apple will endorse and that only this harware will be supported by Apple), current Mac owners will likely keep buying Apple computers.

Call it due to style, hardware quality, or just plain loyalty. So, few Mac users will be lost to buying "cheaper" machines elsewhere. There would be gain however, for those who currently have computers running another OS that could try Mac OS X for the cost of a boxed copy they can install on their existing system. It would then stand to reason that at least some of those users would transition into buying a Mac for their next computer.

I'm not sure how I feel about Mac OS X running on non-Apple machines, but I wouldn't rule it out of the future. At this point, I would keep a pretty wide open mind for just about anything.


© 2005 Kaomso