Apple to Intel: the rumors come true

It stunned me early this morning when I followed the live coverage of WWDC 2005 that Steve Jobs announced a 2-year "Transitions" of Mac from PowerPC to Intel. This marks the 3rd transition in the Mac history. Starting from early 90's from Moto's 680x0 to PowerPC, then ten years after from Mac OS 9 to OS X.

He further surprised me that Mac OS X has been ported to Intel in every releases and demostrated a running 3.6GHz Pentinum 4 "Mac" in the later half of the Keynotes session.

The concept of universal binary is great. But I curious that it is only be able to build univeral binary through XCode and is designed for .app only . How about thousands of respectable Open Source software such as Apache, Samba, OpenLDAP and others?

At the meantime, I summaries some random thought and issues on the Mac transitions:

It's Intel, not AMD.

Why not AMD? Think about their product line-ups. Intel has strong line-ups in all x86 markets that Apple now pursues: Server, Desktop and Mobile. AMD? It is only strong in server and their desktop chip is growing attention. One may argue that Opteron and Athlon 64 is now heading Intel chips in the performance realm and even on power consumption. But AMD is particularly weak in mobile chips, when comparing with the strong Centrino marketing campaign. Please bear in mind that notebook market is why Apple drops IBM's G5.

Apple also needs a single and strong chip vendor to provide support for the processor technology, especially on compiler side. Although gcc will work transparently, as IBM provides xlc compiler on PowerPC Mac, I am not surprised that Intel ports their own Intel C and Fortran Compiler to Intel Mac. This is also what AMD is lacking.

Are you able to run OS X in unbranded PC? Probably Not.

Apple will probably make a proprietary firmware that prohibit to run Mac OS X on other non-Apple PC. Even though sooner or later the hacker should be able to crack this, I am not concern. I am more happy if the Intel Mac are able to run Windows XP or Longhorn as well, not from Virtual PC, but native boot or through dual-boot. This will certainly the most-requested features that most Windows switchers wants.