So Apple is making the switch to Intel? Why? What do they have to gain? Ask yourself the same question that Steve asked himself a decade or more ago when he moved Apple to rebuild the Macintosh OS: what is the main reason that users don't want to switch to Macintosh? If they switch, all of the Applications they have already bought won't work anymore.
I think the reason Apple is switching to Intel is two fold. The first reason is the Intel chips are widely recognized as "faster" (because they have higher clock rates not because they have better throughput necessarily) and because the chips are CHEAPER; I don't think this is the main motivation though. The second reason I think they are switching is to remove the reluctance of users to switch. I think that Apple plans (or if not - they should be planning) to allow Windows Applications to run natively under OS X. Or at the very least to allow Windows Applications to run under OS X with a simple recompile against the transition SDK.
Now that OS X will be released for Intel based machines, we can have a lot of fun running
Xen under the hood. *big smile* Perhaps with the right Xen hack, OS X won't even realize that it isn't running on Apple's hardware *big smile*
Update: Sorry, lost a day in there somewhere.
Apple makes the switch...
