It Finally Happened

And now that the grim reality has begun to sink in, it doesn't look so grim after all. Apple has announced that it is moving to Intel chips. The process will be slow and, like the transition from 68k to PowerPC, it will cause Apple to lead a double life for a few years. I must admit I never thought the day would come. But let's look at this a moment.

The PowerPC architecture, originally designed by IBM, Motorola, and Apple, has seen the departure of Motorola (the truly innovative force in its development) from the design side. IBM has hit a wall and found itself bashing its head against said wall for a couple of years now, indicating a possible end to the superiority of the architecture. Intel, too, has found it difficult to improve its Pentium architecture, having to make its CISC chips more RISC-like, migrating it toward the style used in the PowerPC chips in order to continue to get performance improvements.

Now we have been told that Rosetta, an emulator that runs on the Intel hardware platform, can run the MacOS with almost no performance hit. Some may say that shows the inferiority of the IBM chips, but emulators have improved dramatically in less than a decade, making what once seemed impossible commonplace. What this says to me is something even more dramatic. If the MacOS can run under an emulator at nearly full speed, what happens when it is native on the hardware? when the APIs are designed for the architecture and no longer need to be interpretted by some other piece of software acting as a hardware abstraction layer?

Microsoft's Longhorn, (over)due out around the same time as Apple starts shipping its low-end machines with Intel chips next year, will still lack many of the promised features companies had originally been told to expect as early as late last year. Apple already has those promises fulfilled, and more. If the box will cost the same, the OS run at least as efficiently, and the features be in place on the new Apple/Intel boxes, legacy apps are the only reason to keep from switching in the long term.

Finally, this works because Apple, which has spent twenty years as a hardware company (the Big Brother of the original "1984" commercial was IBM, not Microsoft), has realized that it has a competitive advantage in software and can be supported by its iTunes Music Store and iPod divisions through the transition. It's a company with no debt, strong financials, and deep pockets. Hardware margins may be the big thing, but a migration to a software focus will allow Apple to develop new consumer electronics and services divisions. Not only does this look good for Apple (which even a couple years ago it did not), it may signal trouble for Windows, though not, I suspect Microsoft as a whole. Time, as always, will tell, but it promises to be an interesting ride.