This morning Apple announced that they will be transitioning from the PowerPC chip to Intel. It's all because IBM (Apple's current chip maker) hasn't been able to make the G5 chip faster processors or low power enough to be used in laptops.
Apple has been secretly running OSX on Intel chips in their labs for the last five years and has a road map for developers to easily make the transition while keeping their applications working on the IBM based Macs. Does this mean you shouldn't buy a Mac right now... only if you can wait until June 6th of 2006 and want to be a beta tester for the very first version of their new hardware. If I were you and had plans to buy a Mac, then I'd do so. The only time I'd think about waiting is once January of '06 rolls around.
It could be interesting if Apple would to make OSX only run on Apple hardware (current PC hardware doesn't have everything people expect from a Mac), but to also support Windows. Then we could possibly have the best of both worlds.
UPDATE: It's exactly as I was hoping... if they can pull this off, then I'll upgrade all my machines (I have just under a dozen) so I can run Mac OSX and Windows on the same machine! From news.com:
"Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that." However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said."
For more coverage of the PowerPC to Intel transition, visit www.MacSurfer.com for a list of all the sites that are covering this story.
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