Whats this about Mac OS X on Intel?
(freshness: 02/22/06) That’s right. Apple has announced that they’ll be shifting to Intel x86 CPUs (from PowerPC CPUs). Here’s what is known so far: • There will be a phased transition with Intel based designs mixed in with PowerPC designs starting sometime in 2006 and finishing sometime in 2007. This implies that PowerPC computers will last ship mid-to-late 2007. • Apple is providing tools for developers to build “Universal Binaries” that run on both platforms. Apple has experience doing this in the past (68K->PowerPC fat binaries). NeXTStep/OpenStep (the direct ancestors to Mac OS X) also had fat binaries to run applications on Intel, SPARC, 68K, and PA-RISC (Hewlett-Packard). This means that there is a path for developers to ship both Intel and PowerPC versions simultaneously. • Apple is providing a tool to run PowerPC applications on Intel hardware called Rosetta. This has been shown in demos to run Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop with no changes (but they are slower). From pa
