S teve Jobs says that Apple could move Mac OS X to "any processor," but that the company is sticking with IBM and its family of PowerPC processors for the time being. Why? Because he thinks that IBMis chips are competitive with Intel. The comments came during a financial analyst meeting conducted by Steve Jobs and other Apple execs late on Wednesday. C|Net has an outstanding report on the meeting, including the following:
"Itis perfectly technically feasible to port Panther to any processor," Jobs said at a meeting with financial analysts. But Jobs said the company is happy with IBMis PowerPC family of chips and feels the performance is "quite competitive."
"Right now we donit see a compelling need to switch processor families," Jobs said. "We have all the options in the world, but the PowerPC road map looks very strong."
C|Net is also reporting that Mr. Jobs has effectively closed the idea of the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) supporting any MP3 players other than the iPod, or the iPod supporting downloads from any download service other than the iTMS. From C|Net:
"Why should we work with another music store when we are working with the Microsoft of music stores?" Jobs said. "Iid rather spend our engineering dollars on enhancing the iPod and the iTunes music store."
Thereis more information in the full article, which we recommend as a very good read.