Apple on Intel
Published on 13 Jun 2005 · Filed in Musing · 213 words (estimated 1 minutes to read)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 that 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.)