Apple to Intel--It's true

[Devin Asay]

I was in the room when Steve made the announcement, and you could  
feel the air go out of the room as 3500 developers caught their  
breath at once. Even after all the rumo(u)rs it was clear that a lot  
of people were taken by surprise. It's also clear that Apple has put  
a great deal of thought, work and planning into this transition. As  
Steve pointed out, Apple knows how to do transitions. The mood warmed  
up considerably as he demonstrated using OS X on an Intel box,  
brought of Wolfram research to talk about how they ported Mathematica  
in just a couple of days, gave every attendee a copy of XCode 2.1,  
pointed out that developers won't have to maintain two code bases and  
two compiles, demoed Rosetta, which allows non-Universal code to run  
with binary translation. I think the mood here at WWDC mirrors the  
reactions we are seeing on this list: surprise, uncertainty,  
curiosity, some happiness, some dismay.

Will it affect Apple's user base? Who knows. Mac users are intensely  
loyal, and the transition will be transparent to the end user. If the  
developer community stays on board, Apple should make the transition  
okay.

The bottom line is if you abandon Mac OS X your choice is ... what?  
Switch to Windows? LInux?

I'm not planning to do either.

I'll be interesting in hearing reactions from developers this week.

Devin



Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University