I’m guessing that there will be kernel hooks checking for the “Apple flag” in key hardware, like the CPU and Motherboard. After all, it’s important to ensure that Apple users continue to pay too much for hardware.
Somehow I doubt it would boot Windows - especially if there’s no PC-compatible BIOS, but there’s a good shot that Virtual PC will suddenly become a whole lot faster since the CPU won’t have to be emulated. (That assumes Microsoft goes along with this).
After Jobs’ presentation, 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
from http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universal_binary/universal_binary.pdf
Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware.
Brian
Brian
Its corporate politics. You don’t really expect the truth do you?
Well, Apple did have a point, really. The x86 isn’t a very clean design, but Intel has poured a lot of money into making it run fast.
Can someone smart explain how this will affect me, the backwards and non-techy consumer (who is still grumpy about moving from os 9)? I don’t understand what makes processors processors, and I don’t know if I care about hardware as long as the interface experience is the same (although the Apple aesthetics are nice-- I write this on my retro orange ibook). What’s the real effect here on me, the technophobe dope? I think I’m totally confused and it all sounds ominous but I don’t know if I should worry. I’m mostly ticked becasue now I can’t decide if I should buy a new computer soon, as I’d been planning (I was hoping for a new set of powerbooks so the last generation’s prices would drop for me).
Does this mean that Apple will basically become a software/ operating system company? If (if) anyone can use OSX or whatever on their PC (people who might like the OS but not be happy with Apple hardware prices), won’t that increase Apple’s OS marketshare? Can that be a goal of theirs?
Realistically, you’re not going to see a lot of difference. If Rosetta (the binary translator) works like they demonstrated, your legacy apps will still work, and you can rest assured that there will be new versions of Office, Photoshop, etc. all ready for the new version of OSX.
I was really thinking about getting either an iBook or a Mini in a few months, but now I’m probably going to wait (and who knows, I might just wait for the Intel PowerMac desktops to replace my homebrew XP box.) Being a journalism student, I need to get more Mac experience, and so I don’t want to invest too heavily in a PPC Mac when it’s gonna be a dead-end.
I wonder if Apple can absorb what is sure to be a HUGE slowdown in sales, especially with what appears to be a slowdown in iPod sales over the past quarter.
Apple has ~$7billion in cash. They could theoretically spend $1b / year for 6+ years and have ZERO revenue and still be solvent. (tho of couse if they had zero revenue stock prices would crash) (but even if they sell 0 computers they still have iPods, etc)
Brian
well, I wasn’t happy, but eventually we have to be realistic. As Mr. Jobs said, today the G5 is comparable to a fast Pentium chip, perhaps faster perhaps slower (my experience is slower) but comparable. But in a few years the Intel chips will be 5 times faster in real terms than the best IBM will be offering. And it will continue to get worse. Why not switch now, while people like me will still buy a comparable speed computer to support the company during the switch, rather than wait until they can’t sell anything and try to switch then? Sooner or later Apple was going out of the PPC computer business. Mr. Jobs just decided he would rather decide when.
Too bad though. I like Macs just the way they are. 
So, ah, how long will it be until I can no longer get new, working software for my current Mac? Five years? Ten years? Never going to be an issue?
And if and when I get a new, Intel based Mac, will I still be able to run my really archaic old pre-OS X software in a “Classic” mode?
Ranchoth
(I haven’t felt this vaguely uneasy since the last time I voted.)
Admitted Kool-Aid pouring Mac zealous nutcase here. I also read ArsTechnica and figure that I understand 60-80 % of the summary stuff (but would have no chance at the fine details).
It is my understanding from the ArsTechnica briefs on latter-day Pentiums and Athlons that what these chips do is disassemble a legacy instruction set – the x86 instruction set, essentially the 80386 chip’s instruction set for all practical purposes – and rip it up into RISC-like mini-instrux of equal length and attempt to set them in a proper executable order. They do a phenomenally good job of it, with a very deep pipeline (necessary because it takes many steps between reading in a legacy instruction and retiring it) and admirably good speculative execution and so forth. But the bottom line is that no one would set out from square one and design a computer this way: to compile the OS and the apps for an instruction set that isn’t really native to the chip that’s executing them, and is in fact an elderly, klunky, and outmoded library of computer instructions that only persist into the 21st Century because of installed base and momentum. The PowerPC cheerleaders from the late 90s onward expected the x86 chipset to hit the wall, but Intel and AMD kept finding ways of executing this elderly code faster and faster (economies of scale can do remarkable things, especially in the r&d department) and now it appears that Apple has decided the developers of the PowerPC chip aren’t keeping up even though they aren’t burdened by having to execute that kind of legacy code.
This isn’t all good by any means. Unlike existing Unix and Windows installed base software, neither the Macintosh OS nor its applications have any need for backwards-compatibility with the 386 chip’s era. Sure, the XCode can be compiled to run on industry-standard Intel-architecture chips (thus being converted into the digital representation of the ancient creaky machine language of the x86 architecture, same as Windows and Linux-x86 and their apps and etc) but even after giving honestly intended salutes to Intel for what they’ve accomplished with this architecture (and also kudos to AMD, btw) it just doesn’t make intuitive sense for the Mac to be there.
It’s as if the best word processor was intrinsicallly designed for letters to flow vertically in columns that started on the bottom right and moved up character by character and then leftwards one column at a time until the page was filled, then moved on to the next page. And that this word processor was so efficient that even long after no major world languages operated that way it could display pages and print them so fast that English and Chinese and Swahili word processing modules were superimposed on it and used visual basic or some such thing to grab the insertion point and move it to the appropriate location and repaginate, at the cost of several computer cycles, to make it look like the text was naturally flowing (for instance) from left to right and then dropping down to the next line as each line was filled. When actually that wasn’t what it was designed for and isn’t what it actually does at all on an instruction by instruction basis.
So essentially because of economies of scale and the developmental prowess of the chip developers who create Intel and Intel-compatible x86-family chips, Apple too is signing on with a chip that achieves its admirable power in a very very awkward and cumbersome and (ultimately) inefficient way.
I’d much rather have seen serous R&D going into PowerPC (it is, or was, a nice architecture) or perhaps the Alpha or the Intel Merced or any other design not so hampered by legacy compatibility issues.
(Feel free to tell me I’m out of my league and don’t really know what I’m talking about. It’s probably true).
Well… really I doubt that more than 0.5% of Mac OS (including drivers) isn’t written in C. So as long as you have a compiler that can compile to both platforms, the annoyingness of the assembly language is only going to effect you 0.5% of the time. And then, the other 99.5% of the time, you’ll just be getting faster running C code.