The world turns backwards?

[The Former DMiller]

Well, Jobs sold me. Although the PowerPC architecture is more elegant, it's been evident to Mac fans the last few years that it hasn't been making huge strides. IBM had promised a 3 GHz PPC by now and we still don't have it, and there still isn't a G5 processor that can run cool enough for a laptop. Apple has put a lot of thought into this as they have had OS X running on x86 for years. That showed a lot of forethought. It seems that developers will have to do very little legwork to get their applications to run natively on x86 processors as well as be backwards compatible with the PPC processor. The Mathematica group only had to change 20 lines of code to get their code to run on x86. This will hurt Apple in the short term as many people will hold of buying a new Mac to wait for the Intel Macs, but I think it's a good long term decision.

As for OS X running on non-Macs, I wouldn't bet on it. Apple still makes a lot of their money on hardware, and one of the reasons OS X is so stable is because Apple is able to control the hardware. If they didn't have that control OS X would run into some of the same compatibility problems as Windows. I'm all for this decision as long as I don't have to see those Intel logos on the outside of my Mac or here that damn chime during Apple commercials.