The Back Page - Pre-Keynote Thoughts on Apple Moving to Intel

by - June 6th, 2005

Chicken Little is surely having a coronary. The gods know that the Mac community certainly is, sparked by the Intel story that surfaced Friday. I must admit that I've had a few twinges myself, but really, there's no reason to get worked about this.

To catch you up in case you had a life outside of the Mac world this weekend, CNet News and the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that Apple will be announcing The Big Switch -- in fact it's The Biggest Switch of All -- later today. That's right, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is supposedly going to announce that Apple will be moving the Mac platform over to Intel.

As one of the perennial naysayers to the repeated suggestion over the years that Apple must move to Intel, I will be the first to admit that I was wrong, once Mr. Jobs makes this announcement. Or, rather, sort of wrong.

Analysts like Andrew Neff and Rob Enderle who said that Apple would have to move to Intel or perish were clearly wrong (watch them try and claim they told us so), but the reality is that Apple has turned around its computer business while sticking with PowerPC.

That, of course, is the great irony: Apple's Mac business is booming and even Microsoft is moving to the G5 for its Xbox360 gaming console (which runs a Windows variant), and that's probably what has most of scratching our heads. Why, exactly, would Apple change course now?

The company has worked for years to tell us that the PowerPC was a better processor than Intel's. The company worked its butt off to move developers not only to Mac OS X, AltiVec, and Cocoa, but more recently to the 64-bit architecture of the G5. That's a lot of man-hours invested by thousands of developers working, for companies both big and small, learning these technologies, and some, if not much, of that learning will have become obsolete.

Surely many of those developers will leave the platform if they have to start over yet again, right?

Honestly, I doubt that. If Leander Kahney's speculation is right, Apple has nabbed some emulation software that will make this transition as painless as the move from 68k to PowerPC itself was back in he mid-90s.

That should not only mean that old apps will keep running just fine on an Intel-powered Mac, but that developers will be able to take as much time as they want to migrate their projects over to a new processor.

Even if Mr. Kahney's musings aren't right, however, it's obvious that Apple wouldn't make such a move without a workable transition strategy, so I'll save the developer hand-wringing until Steve lays out that plan.

Of course, there's all the angst that Mac fans are feeling at the notion of having to swallow the embarrassment of moving to a processor we've derided since Ronald Reagan was president. Surely we'd rather hold on to our G3s, G4s, and G5s forever rather than use a stinky Intel-powered computer, right?

Bah, not me! As several of our commentators have also noted, the basis of my love for the Mac platform is Mac OS X and Apple's industrial design. Dave Hamilton noted in his blog this weekend that we might have to kiss some of that industrial design goodbye because x86 is hotter than PowerPC (think Thick Laptops and Nosier Computers), I'd still rather use Mac OS X than Windows or Linux, and I know that when the time comes, I'll buy an Intel-powered Mac, if that's all I can get.

To coin a phrase, Mactel (with apologies to former clone-maker MacTell) would still be better than Wintel any day of the week, and that's all there is to it.

Now here's where we need to remember some pre-announcement reality, and understand that we don't know that the Mac will be moved to x86. It's vaguely possible that a "move to Intel" will actually be to some sort of PowerPC variant Apple and Intel have cooked up together. Apple does own at least some of the PowerPC patent portfolio, perhaps enough to have developed a new processor with Intel.

I don't believe that for a second, however.

I do believe that Steve will announce something Intel-related today, and I think it will come in one of three forms:

In fact, it's the last that I think most likely. It makes more sense to me that Apple would add Intel-powered Macs to its line, not replace the PowerPC entirely. Such a move would appeal to many IT departments, as well as many potential switchers who would feel more comfortable with the Intel name with which they are familiar.

We'll see, however; since we're talking about the same company that is trying to force journalists to reveal sources, pitting the company against the EFF and many of the country's top journalists and editors, not to mention banning books from the Apple Store for being politically incorrect, I won't even be surprised if the Turtlenecked One tells us that Apple is licensing Windows NT as the basis for Mac OS XI.

All that said, let's look at all the reasons not to freak out, no matter what Apple does today.

1.) If Apple moves to Intel, it will have a compelling reason to do so. That reason could be technical (IBM is already more than a year behind promised speed targets), financial (Apple thinks it can make more money selling movies and Intel-powered Macs than it can selling just PowerPC Macs), or reasons of market share (more corporations and consumers would Switch to the Mac if it used Intel), or perhaps some combination of the three.

2.) Apple will have a solid strategy for transitioning the developers and users alike if it does move to Intel.

3.) It's Mac OS X that makes the Mac a Mac.

Lastly, remember that those who think a move to Intel means beige boxes with Mac OS X are ignorant. If Apple moves to Intel, Mac OS X will only run on Apple-branded computers. Apple will use a ROM-lock or some other mechanism to make sure that it's the Apple logo that matters, and not "Intel Inside," because Steve is obsessed with controlling the user experience.

I'll follow this bit of pre-announcement pondering with some specific analysis after the keynote.