The apple has fallen of the tree! Nah, nothing exciting, I say, good for them. I'm referring to Apple changing to Intel in the future.
Who says this is surprising? The never ever made it a secret that they have an x86 port of OSX running along their available PPC version internally, using a FreeBSD/Mach-UNIX as their core, which is highly portable. If they wanted, they could switch to something else again, in a few years, probably in a snap.
I have made a post on slashdot about why it might be a good time for Apple to switch, so I'm not going to repeat that here. What I would like to comment on is the fact that a lot of people are predicting the end of everything that is Apple. Can anybody tell me why it would be? Is there a reason to believe the x86 Macs will be bad or will OSX suddenly be less 'sexy'? They will still be Macs and if they would release models with x86 CPUs in the same case as G5 machines, the user will not even notice the difference.
'Oh, but it will not run PPC software, it will be hell.' - Is that many software on OSX using low level calls, directly accessing hardware so that it would be a problem running OLD software with the PPC emulator included on those machines? Will it be something a recompile won't be able to fix? How fast will the popular programs be ported/recompiled?
Let me tell you this much, I run Linux both on x86-64/32 and PPC (G3) and for Linux there is no difference, everything that runs on my AMD box runs on the PPC as well, except stuff like shockwave plugins and some media codecs. But guess what? You can be damn sure Apple will be taking care of those.
So Apple lovers worry not, in fact, it will be probably be a good thing (tm), even for you.
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