While I was away in Florida on vacation, Apple announced at WWDC 2005 that they will transition to Intel CPUs over the next couple of years. I won’t try to predict what this will mean, or whether Apple will go away, or anything deep like that. It makes perfect sense from a hardware perspective; Apple needs faster CPUs because the whole theme of “processor speed doesn’t matter†just isn’t cutting it with the masses. The ordinary John and Jane Doe out there don’t know that a 2.5GHz G5 is as equally powerful as a 3.6GHz Pentium 4. They just know that the Pentium 4 is faster, and that means the system is better, right?
I bought a PowerBook for Mac OS X, not for the PowerPC CPU inside. Did the PowerPC G4 processor add an era of mystique, of uniqueness? Sure. In the end, however, I bought a PowerBook because I liked Mac OS X and because I could get the applications I needed to get my work done on a Mac. If I can do with with an Intel-powered Mac that is just as fast or faster, then so be it.
(Truth be told, I do worry about Apple’s hardware business, though, and what this will mean for them. Time will tell.)
