Switch to Intel will give Macs power of flexibility

Apple Computer has said it will follow the advice of its own ads: Switch. Starting next year, Apple will build Macintosh computers that run on Intel processors instead of PowerPC chips.

That is an enormous shift for the Cupertino, California, computer company. Since the first Macintosh shipped in 1984, Apple has shunned Intel's processors in favour of chips from Motorola and IBM, to the point of trash-talking the Pentium in its ads.

The way Apple put that history aside to put Intel inside has few precedents in the industry. It is like the Air Force buying Russian MiGs, or Ford bolting a Chevy engine into its next pickup.

But Apple had little choice. PowerPC chips, despite a promising design, have not kept pace with the expectations of Apple or its users.

Two years after chief executive Steve Jobs promised a Power Mac with a three-gigahertz G5 processor within a year, neither that nor a G5 PowerBook are in sight.

Intel's advantage is not speed per se; although its chips outpace PowerPCs in some tests, both kinds of processor work far faster than most users need.

Rather, Intel's edge which it did not even have until two years ago is what Jobs called performance per watt in his June 6 speech announcing the Intel move at an Apple developers' conference in San Francisco.

Intel's Pentium M chip for laptops along with upcoming desktop processors built along similar lines runs more efficiently than PowerPCs or other Intel chips.

This technology allows for much better laptop battery life than in current Apple PowerBooks and iBooks. It will also permit fast desktops that need little electricity and do not produce much heat both critical in compact machines such as Apple's Mac Mini and iMac.

Foresight

Having chosen that goal, Apple has picked a fascinating route to it. If it does this job right, it will not just get more efficient processors; Apple and its customers will find themselves with unmatched computing flexibility.

Not only has Apple already rewritten its operating system to run on Intel chips it had the foresight to write and test an Intel-compatible version of every Mac OS X release alongside the PowerPC versions it shipped it is also preparing software called Rosetta to run most existing Mac software on Intel-based Macs.

And it is providing Mac programmers with a development toolkit, Xcode, to create bilingual, universal binary programs that run on either chip without alteration.

Five Mac shareware developers Thorsten Lemke, author of the GraphicConverter image editor; Andrew Welch, president of Ambrosia Software; Brent Simmons, creator of the Web-newsfeed reader NetNewsWire; Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic Software; and Mike Pinkerton, an AOL developer working on a Firefox-based Web browser called Camino interviewed by e-mail said making their projects universal releases would be, in Welch's words, "no big deal."

They described it as far easier than such earlier Apple transitions as the upgrade from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. At worst, Lemke estimated that he would need two to three months to revise GraphicConverter; at best, Sasser said he would need about an hour and a half to make a program Intel-compatible.

Preparation

Among name-brand Mac developers, such companies as Adobe, Intuit and Microsoft have already said they will have universal releases of their major programs ready.

Apple says it will ship its first Intel-based Macs in mid 2006, with the transition finished by the end of 2007. It says it will continue to restrict OS X to running only on Macs, although I expect to see hackers figure out ways to install it on generic Intel PCs.

Deciding what Mac, if any, to buy in the meantime will be tricky.

A PowerPC-based Mac will be guaranteed to run any Mac software around, and any differences in performance should be minimal at the start.

An Intel-based Mac, by contrast, may balk at some existing Mac programs and will probably be buggier at the start.

But an Intel-inside Mac will bring one huge benefit Windows compatibility.

First, Apple suggests you will be able to install a copy of Windows alongside Mac OS X with moderate effort.

Second, Microsoft's Virtual PC program, which simulates an entire PC inside Mac OS X, should run a lot faster.

Third, a program called Wine (www.winehq.org) that Linux users employ to run individual Windows programs without needing a copy of Windows at all can be revised to run at full speed on an Intel-based Mac.

If Apple and its developers can pull all this off an enormous if the Mac will become the most compatible computer around.

And if Apple can keep its lead in hardware design, it will also remain one of the most elegant and stylish (if not the cheapest). Imagine this: In a year or two, the best Windows PC may come from Apple.