Tuesday, June 7th, 2005
Mac switches to Intel; fanatics eat crow
by Warren
As everyone knows by now, Apple announced yesterday that they’ll be switching to Intel processors in the next year or two. For most users, I’m betting the change will be seamless, and I’m looking forward to owning a Powerbook in a year or two (my G4 still does what I need it to for now) that can dual boot both OS X (which I vastly prefer) and Windows XP for games and other assorted nonsense. Hell, I might even throw in a partition for Linux if I’m feeling especially jaunty.
But while I and a few other Macophiles have taken this change in stride, the true believers don’t seem to know how to take Uncle Steve’s latest move. After extolling the virtues of PowerPC for years, way past the point of any rational discourse, the backpedalling and navel-gazing is sure to reach fever pitch.
One thing I found really amusing is that for all their exclamations of authority and “sources inside Cupertino”, the Mac rumour sites completely dropped the ball on this one. Apple’s been running an Intel version of OS X for five years, and they had no idea. Makes me wonder what else Jobs has up his sleeve in the coming months.