Just a quick breather before the next DiaBD post, but I'm sure most of you have heard by now that both CNET and the WSJ are running stories that Steve Jobs will announce tomorrow that Apple is switching to Intel. We seem to be split evenly between Mac and PC users in the Forum now, so I'm curious to hear both sides of the story. Personally, I have mixed feelings and a shift of this magnitude is bound to cause a lot of anxiety. Of course, the wire services could have it all wrong - I remember well when everyone thought Apple would buy out Be and use the BeOS and instead they bought NeXT and brought back Steve Jobs. For all we know, they might go with the new Cell chip which, after all, is based on the PPC instruction set. Let's assume for the moment that the switch will be to Intel.
For those of you who may not have been around, back when Apple bought NeXT, the NeXTStep OS was designed to run on x86 hardware. It had largely been assumed that Apple would be porting the MacOS to Intel as well as the PPC and that there would be both PPC and Intel Mac Clones. We all know that Steve Jobs pulled the plug on Mac clones, but there are plenty of rumors that the project to port the MacOS to Intel never stopped. Of course, the underlying BSD Unix upon which Darwin is based already exists on both platforms, and recompiling Darwin to run on Intel will probably not be that big a deal. The big problem for Mac users will be Carbon. Carbon is truly a PPC-only platform that will run on Intel only in emulation. Cocoa applications, however, should run just fine on Intel after recompiling. Switching to Intel would likely stop all Carbon development cold and although those of us with current Macs and with Macs purchased during the next year will be able to run all new Cocoa apps, the situation is much murkier for the bulk of our favorite apps, which are now based at least in part on Carbon.
In addition to the blue and yellow boxes laid out with the acquisition of NeXT (Cocoa and Classic - Carbon came later), there was also a rumored red box - a Windows application layer that would be able to run Windows apps natively under OS X. This would have only been relevant had OS X been ported to Intel, but now that that may be happening, this might actually happen. Just as Jobs once laid out a strategy for Carbon so that developers could make the transition, there may be a similar strategy developed to allow traditional Windows applications to coexist under the Mac OS running on Intel. What seems likely is that Apple would release a free Cocoa development pack for Windows. Developers who chose to use it could develop apps that would run on both operating systems - and they would run on older Macs running OS X.
So, what do Forum readers think. Would it open up the world of PC gaming to Mac users, or is it the death of the Mac as we know it?
