Mac Intel Coming '06
Not making it up is Apple's switch to Intel processors. The MacRumors site blogged the announcement live and confirmed the change will take place over the next year or two. According to the site, Mac OSX, for at least the last five years, has been cross-compiled on to the Intel platform and is easily done because it (OSX) was designed to work on both. That said, many applications will have problems being ported over.
The new Intel Macs will be available sometime next year. One wonders when a version of Windows will be sold on the Mac?
Over and above that, one wonders what will happen to hardware sales now that the coming Macs have been announced. The danger to Apple is that sales will fall through the floor while people wait for the next generation hardware to appear a year from now.
If Apple can weather the short-term storm, the future looks bright, especially in laptop sales.
I recently read somewhere that PC laptop sales, for the first time, surpassed desktop sales. If this is true, then I'm sure Apple wants to get in on some of that money. The problem, up to now, was that the IBM chips just couldn't do the job by way of speed and the resulting heat. Intel, on the other hand, has processors specifically designed for use in laptops.
No one can accurately predict the future all the time. But it seems Apple took a look at their own and decided it was change or die.
Aloha!