Wedding of the year: Apple-Intel tie-up |
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Wed, 08 Jun 2005 16:35
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The rumor mills have been working overtime on the Apple-Intel tie-up for some time now. And conforming to the adage that there's never any smoke without fire, Apple CEO Steve Jobs today confirmed that the Apple-Intel wedding is to take place soon, "Yes, it's true," Jobs admitted at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference in San Francisco.
This transition is expected to make Apple compete more strongly vis-à-vis Windows PCs in terms of performance as well as the price. But this transition is not without risks as previous Mac chip changes have led to significant market share losses for Apple. Steve Jobs admitted as much when he said that the change would not be fast, the first Intel-based Macs are slated to appear only in June 2006, and the full product line won’t shift to Intel until the following year, he said. "This is not going to be a transition that happens overnight. It’s going to happen over a period of a few years," Jobs added.
He announced that Apple had been working on the possibility that it would have to shift to Intel over the past five years, "Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life," he said. There have been two versions of the popular OS X, one that runs on the current Mac chips and another secret version that had Intel inside.
| Though this news was widely anticipated, it is not good for a certain International Business Machines Corp, which manufactured the PowerPC used by Apple.
Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at the research firm Insight 64, commented, “I have a lot of trouble understanding why they would do it. Unless there’s something magical, I would have to believe it’s not a good move.” But Jobs said, "We want to be able to make the best computers for our customers moving forward. We don't know how to build them with the future Power PC roadmap."
For Intel though, the acquisition of the Apple business is just another feather in the cap as it now corners around 80 percent of the processor market. Paul Otellini, Intel’s new chief executive, said, “I suspect there is a whole bunch of you that never thought you would see this logo on this stage. I was one of them for a while.” He was sharing the dais with Jobs.
Michael Gartenberg, VP and research director at Jupiter Research, felt that this was a good move, "Apple made it clear that it plans this [platform transition] not to be disruptive, neither to its developers nor its customers. And that's a really good thing. The way that Jobs demonstrated existing applications running on the Intel platform, as well as getting developers to discuss how easy it was to create native applications, will go a long way in both directions to ease both user and developer fears," he said.
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