Development tidbits, struggles, revelations, and still some Flash

Just got down watching live web coverage via MacObserver.

Here are the highlights:

Apple is going to be using Intel chips, starting in 2006. Steve Jobs says that they will support both PowerPC and Intel (x86) for a long time. When Steve was at Next, they did the same thing. Still not sure if this a total switch to Intel, or just Apple getting to pick-and-choose whats best between PowerPC and Intel for the particular application. Either way.. both will be supported for quite some time.

Every release of OSX for the last 5 years has been done for both PowerPC and Intel architectures. Every new project has also had to work on both architectures.

All Cocoa applications will only take a few tweaks to make them work. As an example, Apple had Theo Grey of Wolfram Research, the makers of Mathematica, port over Mathematica. It took them 2 hours from start to finish.

Apple will also have an emulation layer called Rosetta Stone (John note: probably based on Transitive Technologies), that will allow PowerPC apps to run on Intel-based Macs. “… demonstrating it with Quicken, Excel, Photoshop. All of these apps, compiled for PPC, worked fine on the Intel Mac demonstration, It was a completely transparent process.” No Intel-compiled apps were shown running on the Intel-based Mac. Maybe Microsoft can write a better Virtual PC now?

A developer kit will be sold that includes a 3.6 GHx Pentium 4 Mac. They will have to be returned by the end of 2006. They will be priced at US$999, and please note that these are for developers only.

Adobe came out and said they would have their complete line ready for the transition

So what is my take on all of this? Not much really. An Apple Mac will still be an Apple Mac. Life will go on as usual. Apple will still sell premium machines running OSX, except now they have a choice and we have a choice. But its doubtful you will have a choice to run OSX on just any x86-based machine.

Rumors of Apple switching to Intel chips originally started this weekend with CNet posting a confirmed story [link]. Later a few other sources jumped in as well, such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Steve Jobs is preparing to give his keynote for the Apple WWDC at 10am PST today and I guess all the rumors will come to an end and we can get on with either new PowerPC hardware and figuring out how our lives will change with “Intel Inside”.

Early on, I seriously doubted the rumors and figured CNet was as screwy as the rest of the world, but throughout the weekend, I learned other interesting details such as Apples work with Transitive Technologies, whose slogan is: “Our software allows any software application binary to run on any processor / operating system.”. I “lived” through the transition of 68k to PowerPC and remember the days of needing a software FPU for emulation during that transitional period. Transitive Technologies could be the emulator for a new transition.

John Gruber has some good blog posts about the stories and the possibilities. Here is his latest post [link]

Personally, I guess I really don’t care what is “inside” my computer. In my office, I have both a Windows box (Dell XPS) and a Mac Mini. I am happy with both, not because of what chip is in each one, but because of the software on each.

My final opinion: I just don’t see it happening. There are far too many risks compared to any possible benefits of the “ultimate switch”. I’m still expecting to see dual-core g5 announcements (IBM970MP) and maybe even a G5 Powerbook (or dual-core G4 Powerbook?). But there is good reason why I work with Flash, and not as an industry analyst, so your guess is as good as mine right now.