Subject line says it all:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4611505.stm

Personally, I'll be dissapointed if this is true as it will bring us all one step closer to having no real choice when it comes to buying a PC.

Regards
I

It's still a rumour - check out the WWDC webcast tomorrow or Apple.com later the same night.

Just imagine an "Intel Inside" sticker on a PowerMac case!

Intel develops plenty of technology other than CPU's. For Apple to switch to an Intel CPU processor would not only be a significant amount of work on Apple's part (remember the switch from 680xx to PowerPC), but would not be a trivial matter for software developers who would have to make major changes to their applications as well. While I wouldn't rule out the use of Intel technology inside a Mac, I'm skeptical of a switch in CPU.

I guess we will have further insight to these developments tomorrow during Job's keynote at the WWDC, otherwise it's a media frenzy on an otherwise slow news day.

What hasn't been elaborated on in this dramatic shift is that Mac OS X has already made a transition to the x86 platform, in the previous incarnation known as NeXTstep. Over a decade ago, while Apple was fumbling around with Copland (the 'Longhorn' of the 90's), NeXT successfully ported their OS from Motorola chips to run on Sparc, HP-PA, and Pentium processors. For the most part developers only needed to recompile their code using NeXT's development tools to run on any or all platforms. Towards the end of NeXTstep's existence, most of the installations were already running on Intel machines.
Fast forward to Apple's purchase of NeXT after running into a dead-end with their own OS efforts. Not only did they get the robust foundation of what we now brag about in the form of Tiger, but the code had already gone through the arduous process of becoming multi-platform, even though that was not one of the original goals of future Macintosh OS development. It was mostly a hidden feature, just waiting for the right time to 'flip the switch' to turn it on.
I don't wish to oversimplify the task ahead of shifting the Mac over to a new processor, but the hard work has already been done. Certainly there will be potholes along the way as developers rewrite their code or in some cases abandon the platform altogether. But for any software firm that is committed to ongoing development of their applications anyway, adding support for x86 processors shouldn't be an extraordinary effort

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/

They've been running on x86 processors for years. They just haven't been offering the commercial product.

This shift will not be anything like the shift to PowerPC - it's apples and oranges. I have developed software for OS X Server and gotten it to run on Darwin, and it is near trivial.

The fun part will be when "the hackers" get the OS hacked so it will run on your garden-variety Dell box.

Just because of it saying "Intel" doesnt mean x86...

I think this would be a moronic move by apple. I've been a customer a long time. But, if they force me to repurchase all my software I will leave them for Linux or maybe even Windows.

I can't believe that Jobs would even consider blowing away his installed base.

Its true - APPLE IS MOVING TO INTEL. June 2006! Im in shock (macuser since 1988)

It absolutely does. The volume that Apple buys simply can't support the R&D bill required for modern processor development and even with IBM's games console sales of the PPC processor the selection of PPC processors available doesn't look good compared to Intel's range. If they had done this back when they started integrating the Next OS into the Mac product they would probably have more market share today!

It's official. I just watched the keynote.

All your software will work seamlessly on an Intel version of OS X when the boxes come out. No need to repurchase. It will not take full advantage of the performance possible from the processor, but, seeing as how the Intel chips will run faster than a PPC would anyway, it will be a wash.

Steve said that developers will be able to port their PowerPC software fairly painlessly and can produce hybrid binaries (able to run on either PPC or Intel) using XCode easily.

One of the demos during the keynote was Mathematica running on an Intel Mac. The representative from Wolfram Research, which produces Mathematica, said that they ported the OS X version this weekend to Intel in two hours.

I'm sure there will be some snags, and not all will go as smoothly as presented today, but considering that a production-ready, Intel version of OS X has been developed in parallel with the PPC version for each and every release of OS X (5 in the past 5 years), it's not coming out of the blue. It's been in the back pocket now since the beginning, as Steve said, "just in case."

There will probably be a webcast of the keynote available later today. I'll post a link as soon as I see it.

My Powerbook G4 and Power Macintosh G5 will be worth as much as a AMIGA or a Beta videoplayer next fall

Frankly I think it is a great move. As noted, OS X is pretty much hardware agnostic and the few apps that work in PowerPC Assembler should be able to be ported over.

This will allow Apple to offer more powerful desktops and laptops, and since most current-generation Macs already use the same I/O interfaces as Windows/Unix/Linux PCs do, the move should be far more seamless then the 680x0 to PowerPC switch was - and Apple handled that quite well from the software side.

What type of Intel chip wasn't really talked about in the keynote, but I would assume they'll be using whatever Intel is already developing/producing. They didn't mention any plans to begin producing PPC processors, and, in fact, Steve said that the PPC roadmap simply won't meet Apple's needs down the line, particularly with respect to the expected power-to-performance ratio.

Considering they already had a box running at the keynote I doubt there is any new processor in the works. I notice also that members of the Mac dev community can pick up a new intel box for a grand, presumably fairly soon.

What, o what, will the poor fanboys and sycophants do now? The PowerPC is way faster than Intel! Just look at the <insert random oddly-weighted benchmark here>! Gaussian blur is 4% faster!"

LOL

PPC doesn't even meet their needs today and I'm sure developments like the Pentium M must have increased the level of frustration at Apple HQ. Apple users can expect some more power efficient laptops in future! IBM seems to have done a better job of producing an attractive price/performance product for games consoles than they have for Apple's range.

I'll be interested to see what they do. Maybe I'll buy a Mac again at some point! I abandoned them years ago in favor of ugly boxes that had orders of magnitude more software available.