Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

I hadn’t been keeping too close an eye on this, because we’ve got higher priorities right now than buying new computers. But there have been rumors lately about some sort of deal between Apple and Intel. The speculations mainly fell into two camps: 1) Apple would release a new Pentium-based Macintosh computer, or 2) Intel would begin producing a new PowerPC compatible CPU.

Steve Jobs just dropped the bomb: Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006

Basically, it seems, Apple has been disappointed with IBM’s inability to deliver a G5 processor that could break the 3GHz barrier or with heat characteristics that would be usable for laptops. They’ve been developing an Intel-based Macintosh, along with the cross-platform tools needed to manage the transition, secretly over the past five years.

There are some more details from the keynote available over on Engadget and The Mac Observer. Of note: Jobs displayed the slides for his keynote using a Macintosh powered by a 3.6GHz Pentium 4. He showed demos of Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and Mathematica running on the new platform. Existing PowerPC binaries will be able to run on the new system thanks to a new real-time emulation layer called Rosetta. The Wolfram Research folks were able to get Mathematica, which has millions of lines of source code, modified and re-compiled for the new platform in just a couple of days.

via: kottke. Also, as Dave Winer points out (and tons of people are sure to overlook), this does not mean that you’ll be able to run future versions of OS-X on your Dell computer. Apple has always been able to ensure a certain level of stability in their systems because the hardware was locked down. This is unlikely to change anytime soon. But the possibility of a version of Windows that runs on the new Apple hardware is a different story.