Apple / Intel One Year Anniversary!

Today is the one-year anniversary of the Apple-Intel alliance. It was June 6, 2005, when Steve Jobs made the official announcement at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. Rumors swirled about Apple switching from PowerPC to Intel in the days just prior to the conference, but the official announcement was still shocking. After all, Apple had spend more than a decade teasing Intel about the better performance of PowerPC chips. However, IBM and Motorola were not able to upgrade their offerings fast enough for Apple, and, in particular, were not able to offer a G5 chip for the next generation of Apple laptops.

Reactions of Apple’s customers ranged from “Yes! Now we’ll have some real power in our Powerbooks / Powermacs,” to “Intel sucks! Now Apple sucks too!”

I was electrified by the news. For one thing, it meant that Apple would have a more diverse line of chips available to them, hopefully leading to a more diverse offering of computers. Also, Apple made it clear from the being that it would be possible to run other operating systems on the Mac, than OS X, with the Intel chip.

Now we can run OS X, XP, and Linux all on the same Macintosh computer, which has already proven to be extremely useful (not to me personally.) As I’ve written elsewhere “Apple continues to “ignite a revolution in the personal computer industry,” by creating the tools we want and need to remain productive and creative in our brave new world.