Apple and Intel

Published 7 June 05 by Justin French, 4 comments

Just a few hours before Steve Jobs was due to take the stage for the 2005 WWDC, I wrote the following as part of a much larger (but never published) article on the topic:

I’m fully prepared to be proven wrong in a few hours time after Steve Jobs’ keynote at the WWDC, here’s my unqualified prediction – There is no way in hell that Apple will ditch the PowerPC chip in favour of Intel x86 CPUs for it’s main line of desktop computers.

Hah! Wrong.

I’m not sure how I feel about the whole deal yet, but if Apple (and the Developer Community) continues to give me a beautiful user experience through nice hardware and software, and doesn’t make life awkward for PowerPC hardware owners, I’m happy.

What gets me really excited is the prospect of OS X competing directly with Windows for “Operating System of Choice” on Joe Average’s home Intel-based PC. Sure, at this stage we’re all assuming OS X will only run on Apple hardware (not just any Intel CPU), but imagine what Apple’s market share could be if OS X was hardware-neutral!

It would give them a great platform for selling truckloads more of their far superior software (OS X itself, Logic, Final Cut, the iLife suite, the iWork suite), but obviously they’d have to seriously rethink the hardware manufacturing side of things. I can’t see that happening any time soon – but I’ve already been wrong once in the past 12 hours!

Microsoft has made a truckload of money out of software (not hardware), so Apple has to be at least considering the idea that “Leopard” (the code name for OS X 10.5) could really pounce (pun intended) on Longhorn and start eating away at that ~95% market share.

Of course I now have no idea what to do about hardware. There’s no way I’ll stick with this 1Ghz G4 Tower for another year (and most certainly not 2007), so I guess I’ll be one of the many who put their faith in Apple’s hands, buying a PowerPC-equipped system knowing full well that the future is very Intel.

It’s going to be an interesting couple of years, that’s for sure.