It's true! ;) Apple is planning it's third grand transition (after the switch from the 68k to PowerPC and from OS9 to OSX). They plan to switch from the PowerPC to the Intel architecture in a period of two years. We should start seeing Intel-based Mac's as early as next year. I personally am a bit sad, I liked the PowerPC architecture and I hope IBM will pump some life to the PPC roadmap thus make Apple at least consider supporting multiple architectures. Hell, why not see OSX on the Cell processor? They have compilers that can compile to the both platforms and even make one binary that contains code for both platforms (they call them Universal binaries). But aren't there more that just two platforms? There is the PowerPC,the x86 (with MMX but no SSE, with SSE but no SSE2), the x86-64 (AMD wasn't even mentioned) and god knows what else you can pump into this list with time so you can quickly get a complex matrix you'll have hard work to keep small. Apple has to get really careful really fast as it's entering a domain where up until now MS has ruled unequalled. So the question is to they want to be the Apple that controls the whole stack from iron to OS or could they suffice with supporting OSX and selling also hardware of their own?
And don't think that MS will sleep over this as nothing has happened (on the other hand they do mention AMD quite a bit).
Anyhow, Jobs did an excellent keynote as always. There are quite a few comic moments (no spoilers here except the title :) also. I did feel that sometimes I saw glitches like the image-looking app that somehow seemed smoother on the Gx from a year ago. Maybe it's not optimized yet or perhaps the RISC architecture is better in handling large quantities of data then the CISC (or better, Intel takes the CISC code and translates it internally to RISC). Who knows.

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