This is Big News. Prolific online editorial speculation about Intel chips making their way into Macintosh computers have been floating around for years, coming alive with ferocity once more preceding this years WWMD. Some "nay-sayers" have touted the superiority of the PowerPC over the Pentium for years as well. Speculation was rampant about an announcement supporting "Macs with Intel inside" expected in Steve Jobs' keynote speech opening Monday's World Wide Macintosh Developer's Conference in San Francisco. Reinforced by articles in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes this time around, yielding significant credence to the rumors.

Steve Jobs confirmed the "rumors" as true, "Intel processors will be in Macintosh computers beginning in June 2006". Why? "As we look ahead we can envision some amazing products that we can build, but we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map," Jobs said during his presentation at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference at Moscone West in downtown San Francisco. "Intel's processor roadmap is more aligned with what we envision as our future for the next ten years", he continued.

After bemoaning and groaning about this decision myself, I now think it's the perfect move for Apple at this time. Famed Print, Radio and TV personality and Macintosh enthusiast supreme, John Dvorak has written for years how an Apple with Intel inside, was the way for Apple to go. Maybe Steve Jobs has read some of John's articles. I loved watching John Dvorak on ZDTV (a cable computer network channel now off the air) whenever he talked about the Mac. Most of his readers thought John had turned totally cynical, and often "Mac Bashing" with scathing critics about how Apple was driving their platform. My take is that John really likes the Mac platform and is critical becasue he hated to see the platform withering in popularity.

Anyway, I digress. Sure the first laptops and low end machines might have a Pentium in them. I don't think that this move by Apple will let Intel sit on it's laurels. In fact Intel itself claims the Pentium has be "hobbled" by having to comply with Windows constraints. Since Microsoft signed a deal with IBM (instead of Intel) to provide PowerPC chips for their X-BOX game system, I'd bet Intel is rethinking it's loyalty and confinement the partnership called "Wintel" has created for them over the last ten years or so.

Look for completely new breed of  "Core" chips in the first "Intel Inside Macs" (coined "Mactels"), but expect something completely new and astounding to be released in the high end Macs. It may be an entirely newly branded processor chip, aided by Apple's approach in OS and hardware requirements. High end machines might come out using dual core, dual process Itaniums, Intels 64 bit superchip or a completely renamed Intel super chip. With competitive pricing and a proven secure OS there will be many converts to Apple given this new choice. Yes, OSX may have a few flaws, but it is far superior in performance and stabilty over previous MacOS. With the right processors, I think any performance issues we are seeing today will disapear.

Don't worry about whether you should buy a current Mac, it will run the latest and greatest software available today and into the foreseeable future. In fact I don't envision a scenario where current machines fail to run upgrades of popular software for the next several years. There may be a problem for really high end users such as those doing video editing with the Final Cut Pro Suite. You can bank money that Apple will optimize it's flagship software to work the best on the hardware that Intel provides.

That high end software will be the first casualty (IMNSHO) of the switch, if there are any at all. The logic? Apple will want to sell all of it's most expensive hardware and software, and the movie and video guys often just don't care what they spend. They just want the best.

The PowerPC microprocessor currently called the G5 in many of Apple's high end Macintosh computers appears stalled at just under the 3.0 gigahertz clock speed that Jobs promised the Mac would be at by years end of 2004. The most recent "speed bump" for the high end Mac was from 2.5ghz to 2.7ghz. Perceptually, the difference is negligible. In real word testing by an organization called "Bare Feats", the difference is about 1-2% in real time speed improvements.

In Apple's defense they did improve some other features of the high end Mac including the front side bus speed, better graphics card with more ram, and a faster more capable "Super Drive" for making DVD's and CD's, while reducing the price of the machine. By the way, this high end machine also uses a "water pump" not too unlike the one in your automobile. It's a water cooling system used to get the chip up to speed and maintain reliability. Heat vs. speed and power consumption "per watt" is another reason Jobs claims why Apple is making the switch to Intel CPUs.

Ironically it has been discovered that previous models of the tower computers that came with a Super Drive had been "throttled back" to produce lower speeds than the manufacturer Pioneer intended, actually branded with a different product code. Enterprising Mac users discovered a way to restore the drive to it's original specs which match the current optical drive specs in high end Macs. (yours truly "flashed" my own DVD-R drive which now can burn DVD's at 16x DVD-r or DVD+R disks - voiding the warranty of course).

So what does this all mean to average home iMac users? Will Apple abandon it's current user base running PowerPC's, once the new machines start to sell? The answer will unfold of course a year from now, but simply the answer (in this author's opinion) is, "Yes and No". Let's face it, Apple is the business of selling computers and developing great innovative software. So they will do whatever they have to do in order to sell hardware and software. Eventually there will be enough of a difference where legacy machines (read today's Macs) will not work with future software revisions. If you "jones" for the latest and greatest software, you might eventually HAVE to buy a new Mac. But hey, don't they just keep getting cooler (and hotter in the G5 case) and cooler ?!?!

It's in Apple's best interest to satisfy their current user base. Our purchases have been what kept Apple going during it's slower sales periods. But really, they want to increase the Macintosh presence with users who currently use the "darkside" combination of Microsoft Windows and Intel based hardware. Look for Apple to do everything they can to make the transition a smooth one for current end users, though.

To many Mac loyalists, using the Intel processors is like "joining the darkside" the enemy and "heresy". As there has been this battle for desktop dominance over the last what, 20 years? Apple itself fueled the fire (literally) by mocking one of Intel's advertising campaigns, with one of it's own, showing a burning Intel bunny and a guy in a space suit, clean room mylar getup. This obviously to tout the superiority of PowerPC processors, implying that the speed of the PowePC would "smoke" Intel's Pentium. Intel's CEO showed the ad at Monday's conference after getting a big HUG from Steve Jobs.

In some "heads up" speed bench tests, Apple proved their claims to be true. However on the practical side, the Pentium processor has been winning the speed battle, in real word testing "hands down", easily for the last five years. Really, why have Mac users stayed so loyal, especially through multiple transitions from the 68000 CPU, Quadra series CPU, to now the PowerPC? Wasn't it painful transitioning from OS9 to OSX? Oh yes Myrtle, it was. Did we benefit by sticking loyally, almost blindly to our dear platform?

My answer is - yes. We do not have to worry so much about virus and spyware that plagues the Wintel platform. It is true that there are fewer Mac users to aim terror virus attacks at, therefore the horrible impact will not be so great. But it is also true that with OSX we enjoy a significantly higher degree of security than any Windows platform. Heck our experiences with our machines are almost "fun" even for those of us making a living with the machines.

"One of my neighbors, was a serious game player guy on a Wintel box made by AlienWare - it glowed in the dark. It's a high end speed demon for playing the latest PC games, and as expensive as a dual G5. I guess he got fed up with it one day and threw it over his railing from the 18th floor and it exploded into a buzillion pieces on the patio below my windows. I heard it and went to my balcony to see what the noise was about. I knew right away who it was when I saw the lime green and plastic case in pieces. He went out and bought a dual processor Mac the next day. He is also a graphic artist, and his wife wants him to get to work and quit playing games on his computer anyway".

Migrating from OS9 to OSX was a bit of a pain as well as a blessing for businesses dependent on Macintosh computers for production, such as publishers. Creative types have enjoyed the desktop freedom for years, allowing them to customize their desktops, add software, basically store files wherever they want. So implementing OSX in Creative Art departments has been a challenge. Artists don't like passwords, and don't understand what all the "security fuss" is all about. "Why can't I put this file into the 'Library' where I want to?" As a System Administrator I usually have to answer, "because you can't!"

Artsy types now have to comply with "rules" they have never had to before. "This is an improvement?" they retort. After a while they realize OSX value to them. Most power users have just gotten used to system freezes and constant "restarts" under OS9. So much so they become oblivious to it happening. Now under OSX they almost NEVER have to restart. It now shocks them after days of blissful use that they might have to restart once in a while to repair a glitch they might be experiencing.

Unfortunatley I project that this "high end" user market will be the most to be affected by Apple's direction planning to use the Intel processor as it's core processor in ALL Macs by the end of 2007. Businesses are the most fickle when it comes to spending money on new hardware. So the challenge of having to completely retool in a few short years, is not an appealing one.

There are many Mac users in business, that have not completely migrated to OSX. Partly because of the hardware they currently have, partly because whatever they are using their Macs for is still working, so why change anything? Most businesses feel they should get five years or more out of a piece of hardware they purchase. They fail to realize and plan on the computer industry using "Moore's Law". Moore's Law says that processor speed will double every six months or so. Not quite true, but there have been steady regular product replacement (upgrades) throughout the industry, on about that same schedule.

Apple pointed the finger directly at IBM, the chipmaker supplying the G5 processor, for failure to deliver chips, when Apple missed a promised deadline for delivery of a new announced iMac last year. IBM has also failed to deliver a CPU of G5 flavor that will work in a laptop. So now Apple says they will use Intel chips in all of their future machines. I don't ever expect to see a G5 PowerBook.

I also project that the first machines we will see with "Intel Inside" will be the "low end" machines and laptops. I think that these machines will work flawlessly with any software that you have now, assuming of course you are using OSX Panther or Tiger. These first machines may have a Pentium X86 processor or a completely new chip built on a new "CORE", and may even run Windows, right out of the box. Apple will code something into the hardware to make it necessary to use OSX even though technically the hardware could support both OS'. Apple wants to keep us in the fold and convert Windows users into Apple OSX users.

How does this threaten Microsoft? Microsoft has yet to deliver a secure operating system, and the next release of the Windows OS is about a year away (ironically about the same time Apple will start selling "Intel Inside" Macs). MS will stay friendly to Macintosh because of Microsoft Office. The margin of profit is far greater on their Office Suite than it is on the operating systems they discount to Dell and Hewlett Packard bundled on their new computers. The Mac version of Office is pretty good and equally powerful and compatible to it's Windows version. Files from one are useable on the other without any fanfare or bother. Microsoft has "committed" to continued development of the Mac version of Office. They make even more on the Mac version I think, as they charge more for it.

So even if there are millions of converts from the Windows to Macintosh platform, those users will still want to use what they are most familiar with. MS Office works the same for the most part, on both platforms. Microsoft claims their next Windows version will be secure. Since it's an unknown, Apple's OSX already IS a secure platform. I wouldn't be surprised to see the high end Macs capable of running Windows as well as OSX - and priced competitively with Dell or HP high end machines. Who wouldn't want a dual boot system without having to run under emulation? Personally, I'd never want to run mine in Windows and don't use it if I don't absolutely have to. I do want a 4ghz Dual processor or dual core Macintosh, in a case half the size of the current towers.

I am bristling with anticipation and can't wait to see what Apple comes up with "Intel Inside".

(p.s - I bought my first "new" computer - a black Macbook as soon as they were available in June 2006.  Up 'til now, I HAVE NEVER have bought a first gen machine for myself - always opting for refurbs after the second gen of a new archetecture has been released.)

---

Copyright© 2005 Avi Learner - avi@adweb.biz
Reproduction in any format, without prior written permission is prohibited.