The Apple WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) 2005 has just wrapped up, with the focus being a rather startling confirmation of rumors that have been circulating for years now. Steve Jobs announced today that the rumors of Mac OSX and the Macintosh hardware platform transitioning to Intel hardware is in fact true.
Also confirmed are the rumors of OSX having been run on Intel machines in an Apple lab since 2000 to ensure the operating system design was cross-platform from the ground up (referred to as Project Marklar on the rumor sites).
The transition will take place over the next two years, being helped along by the XCode developer tool which will be able to compile "universal binaries", which are likely to be similar to the fat binaries which were used in the transition from 68k to PPC architecture. Most of the newer OSX APIs will take a simple recompile to work on the new Intel hardware, and there will also be some kind of dynamic binary translation taking place for older apps.
While I was hoping the deal was something more along the lines of Apple announcing a new portable device or media platform, using a Pentium M or perhaps an XScale, which seemed the simplest and most likely explanation for the rumor mill running so strongly, this could be welcome news if it helps the longevity of the Mac platform and won't completely outmode my current software investment. I expect my G4 to live on for a few more years, however, as it's ideal for what I use it for in terms of not only development, but music and PVR via EyeTV.
Next area of rumor mill speculation- what are the implications of this move for Apple in terms of Intel's involvement with so-called Trusted Computing? Will iTunes and any future media endeavors be encumbered by end-to-end hardware DRM? Seems inevitable now, and maybe that's not too bad if it gets quality paid content on our machines. But what could this mean for free content models, such as Furthernet or any digital content with Creative Commons licensing? What about "untrusted" apps like GPL software is likely to become? Please, Apple, keep our computers working FOR US, not for Hollywood. We are not "consumers", we are your customers.
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