So it's official. Apple are moving to Intel processors.
The atmosphere in the SteveNote was hilarious. He came out and said it, and… well imagine a room full of 4000 stunned mullets… OMG as the kids say. If you're watching the keynote stream, look out for the Woz. There were definitely some odd looks on his face…
It certainly leaves a bad taste regarding the Think Secret lawsuit. As Ernest Miller asked Apple and CNet: Where's the Lawsuit?.
It's clear these were deliberate leaks, and the fact that the usual suspects were so silent seems to confirm the rumours of Apple paying them off to keep quiet.
I certainly don't think it's going to be the disaster that a lot of the Mac community seem to be predicting, but I am concerned about audio apps. These are often Carbon, built with Metrowerks, and make heavy use of Altivec, making them the hardest apps to produce fat binaries for. Couple that with the fact that we've already seen a huge shift to Windows for audio production over the last five years or so, and I imagine some of these companies are asking themselves some serious questions about whether they're going to continue releasing Mac versions of their software.
Considering Digidesign haven't even gotten Pro Tools LE running under 10.4 yet, I'm not going to hold my breath for a Mac/x86 version any time soon after release.
Everyone keeps asking about running OS X on non-Apple x86 boxes and running Windows on OS X/x86. I see it like this:
- Apple won't let you legally run OS X on a non-Apple machine.
- People will work out how to do it anyway, but you won't see vendors doing it.
- It might actually increase Apple's mindshare, and force them to concentrate on offering hardware integration advantages
- We'll see something like WINE for OS X/x86. Perhaps that's the only way we'll ever see a decent Exchange client. Be particularly interesting if Microsoft decide to do this, but I'd love to see VMWare for OS X.
Good to see that stalwart of the Australian blogosphere, John Quiggin getting in on the action too.
Oh and I think Daring Fireball has some crow to eat…:)