Apple Switches Its Core

Apple shaking hands with Intel is easily one of the weirder moments in recent computing history. My column yesterday takes a look at this surprising decision, why Apple did it and what this might mean for its customers -- and everybody else who uses a personal computer.

Elsewhere in Sunday's paper, Daniel Greenberg tries out a new Yamaha sound system that produces many channels of sound from one big speaker unit. In Web Watch, Leslie Walker covers a new search tool from Yahoo. Our reviewers assess three new games -- Batman Begins, Medal of Honor: European Assault and Psychonauts. In And in Help File, I get a chance to decry -- yet again -- the continued mess of incompatible DVD-recording formats.

Steve Jobs's Big Surprise

I had plenty of chances to see the Intel news coming -- but I never quite thought it would happen. Apple-on-Intel rumors have percolated for years; some of them were even true.

For example, Apple did, in fact, assign a team of programmers to get the Mac OS to run on Intel chips in the early '90s, a project it code-named Star Trek.

When Apple bought NeXT, the computer company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple, it gained an operating system that had been released for both Motorola and Intel processors -- and which became a big part of Mac OS X.

As OS X became a commercial reality, reports periodically suggested that Apple kept an Intel-compatible version of it simmering away in its own kitchens. These stories usually suggested this was simply a cheap insurance policy in case PowerPC chip development hit a wall, or perhaps an engineering tactic to encourage Apple's developers to write cleaner code.

Those items were true as well, as Jobs said in his keynote last week at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. He said Mac OS X had been leading a "secret double life," with Intel versions written but never shipped alongside each public PowerPC release.

But what none of the rumors and reports quite got was the way Apple hopes to make this transition essentially invisible to customers: by creating software to run most old Mac applications on new Intel-powered machines, and by giving developers tools to make programs that run without modification on both kinds of processor.

Both measures, if done right, will eliminate or ameliorate the two biggest worries in this kind of chip transition -- that buyers of the new machines will have to give up their old software, and that owners of the older hardware won't be able to run programs released for the newer generation of computer.

(Obligatory disclaimer: Please don't forget the magic word "if" in the preceding sentence. None of this is guaranteed.)

And so there you had Jobs, singing Intel's praises at the start of the conference. Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed up, calling Apple "the world's most innovative personal computer company." (I'm sure Dell, HP, Gateway and their ilk were flattered by that statement. But maybe Intel is tired of trying to jumpstart creativity by spending time and money on stylish PC design concepts that nobody bothers to build.)