Apple switches to Intel

Everyone seems to be talking about Apple's decision to switch to intel this week, so I thought I would add my comments.

Apple seem to be saying they are switching because IBM weren't providing hardware providing the right performance to power relationships needed to provide the latest high spec machines and laptops.

I find this curious though when all the next gen console makers have announced that they will be using PowerPC based systems in their next products.
I guess this will be a much bigger install base for IBM, so they are less concerned about loosing the Apple business.

The whole move does raise a number of questions though:

• Will you now be able to run OSX on a standard PC, and will Apple support it? What about a duel boot Windows/OSX system?
• Will apple start selling machines running windows? (I doubt it :) )
• Will the change enable apple to produce a tablet pc - the rumors seem to suggest so!
• Would anyone buy an apple machine now, knowing that the whole architecture will change next year??

At least the fact that Apple reckon they will be able to emulate the PowerPC architecture for older apps gives me hope that Microsoft will be able to do it the other way round to get full backwards compatibility on the XBox 360!! :)


What ever the case, at least we can take some amusement from this page on the apple.com website, saying how much better the G5 CPUs are compared to Intel's P4s. :-)