Intel on the Mac

It makes sense. Mostly it's about the power consumption to processing ratio - the PowerPC simply isn't keeping up.

It's a bit sad and scary to see Intel take one more niche (Sun next?) but it seems like the right decision for Apple.

It's worth watching Jobs' keynote presentation at the Apple Developer's Conference, to hear him explain his reasoning and the transition plan. Besides, it's always fun watching a master showman. He reveals that Apple has been building OSX for Intel for the last five years, "just in case". He describes what it will take for developers to create a "universal binary" that will run on both processor platforms, and demos a dynamic binary translator ("Rosetta") that will run PowerPC apps on the Intel platform.

Almost none of this is about OSX running on non-Apple platforms (which Apple will certainly discourage) or Windows running on Apple platforms (which Apple will allow and might be an incremental plus from the transition). I believe the party line on this - it's about Apple choosing the best processor technology going forward.

It sounds like Apple has a good plan, let's hope they can execute.