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June 6, 2005
Well, in case anyone hasn’t heard yet, Apple is moving to Intel CPUs.
This is for serious, and in my opinion, probably a good thing.
Read more here: http://www4.macnn.com/macnn/wwdc/05/index.html
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Nope… Not at all. They are going to use different CPUs, but I’m fairly certain that Apple will stick with OpenBoot and there will be some sort of serious hardware lock-in between the OS and the board.
After all, Apple will *strive* to keep the end user experience the same, so for all intent and purpose users will see no difference between CPUs except for speed. Think of it as if Apple changed any other chipset in the box…
Intel = good. It’s a smart move, and we will start seeing some more hardware that works cross-platform as originally promised.
Actually, most PCI hardware does work on Apple and Intel stuff.
The end result of this won’t be much from the end user perspective, though. Apple will keep cranking out their shiny, nice hardware, the CPUs will just happen to be Intel as opposed to IBM.
What about software compatibility issues?
Did you read the linked article? Look for keywords Rosetta, Universal Binary (aka Fat Binaries), and Xcode 2.1.
Yes, but i don’t feel comfortable with having to use a separate program to convert all the code. Especially when working with music and video.
it seems like it’ll be fairly trivial to port over most programs. If they can do Mathematica as easily as they did, most things shouldn’t take too long to recompile or whatever.
Well, it is possible Mathematica was a bit of a ruse… It’s already running on a ton of platforms. However, I don’t think it’ll be that difficult.
But… You won’t. It’ll be as transparent as the tools which the devs of some of your favorite plugins used to convert them from other platforms. Not to mention, that will only be for stuff for which there isn’t a fat binary available. Developers are given a huge amount of lead time on this… Over a year before things even begin being for sale.
I anticipate very little trouble, personally.
i’m excited about the move, but really worried about long term support on the software I use now. Already dropped a good amount of monies into apple and stuff. :)
I’m sure all will be fine though.