Apple and Intel: A Prediction
By Daniel Miessler on June 5th, 2005: Tagged as Technology
Well, we’ve all heard the news about Apple dumping IBM and moving to Intel chips. The crazy thing is that most everyone is assuming something too large to assume — that the new chips will be x86. Nobody said they would be as far as I can tell, and a select few in the various forums have picked up on this.
PPC != IBM Intel != x86
Remember, Intel could simply start making PPC chips for Apple, or some sort of new, hybrid architecture could be designed.
In short, this news is not the same as, “Apple moving to x86 architecture.” That would be far bigger news, in my view.
Edit: Well, it seems they did go to the x86 architecture — trouble is, they have explicitly stated that upcoming versions of x86 will only run on Macs. In my original post I made the mistake of assuming that if they went to x86 that would mean you could then run upcoming versions of OS X on any PC. That’s not the case.
Boo…hiss…
I just can’t get excited about this; they basically didn’t do anything but change chip manufacturers. They didn’t open anything. They didn’t decide to make OS X more available to non-Mac users.
Essentially, they came out and said that their Mac-only OS will now run on a different architecture. Big deal. It’s still Mac-only.
