Personally, I'm still ambivalent about the up-coming Apple-Intel alliance. I don't really care what is inside my Mac, as long as it is a Mac. I've never relied on machine language code (other than in that track from Sandinista - but that's a different topic altogether), so what concerns me is the viability of technologies like Open-Firmware (allowing Target mode, booting from a CD, etc), the various number crunching (floating point) and AltiVec/Velocity Engine advantages. Also, what is going to happen with 64 bit innovations? Is Leopard going to have more 64 bit pieces? I really have not followed Intel chip development much, other than during the time we had some Intel stock a few years ago.
The PowerPC was marketed as more innovative, engineering-wise, is that no longer an accurate statement?
Again, really, I don't care too much who manufactures the chip, as long as my essential applications work (Adobe, Microsoft Office, Now Contact, ecto, Eudora, etc., all of these are cross-platform anyway.), and I feel like my computer is a Mac and not the still-clunky Windows step-child, XP or Longhorn, or whatever.
Walt Mossberg - WSJ.com - Personal Technology - What the Apple Plan To Switch to Intel Chips Means for Consumers:
Even consumers who use Microsoft Windows, which runs on the vast majority of computers, will benefit, because the Mac's impact on the industry is vastly greater than its market share. Apple is the most innovative major computer maker, and the only one largely dedicated to serving consumers instead of large corporate customers. Almost everything it does is later copied by the Windows PC makers, so keeping Apple strong and innovating is good for Windows users, too.
...Q: Now that Apple will be using the same processor as Dell, H-P and other competitors, will people be able to run the Mac operating system on these non-Apple machines? Unless some hacker does a masterful job, the answer is no. Apple intends to keep its operating system and hardware tied tightly together. The new Intel-based versions of the Mac's OS X operating system will be designed so that they cannot run on non-Apple hardware, and Apple has no plans to license OS X to other PC makers.Will users be able to install and run Microsoft Windows on the new Intel-based Macs?
Apple's official position is that it won't block the use of Windows on its new machines. Unofficially, however, the company says people won't be able to just buy a copy of Windows XP and install it on an Intel-based Mac. That's because Apple is unlikely to build in all the standard under-the-hood hardware pieces that Windows is designed to mate with. And it won't supply any special software called “drivers” to help Windows use the unique under-the-hood hardware Apple will use.
However, I expect some third-party company to supply the missing drivers and otherwise make it possible to run Windows on an Intel-based Mac. Microsoft itself might even do this. That would allow Mac users to run Windows programs that lack Mac equivalents at speeds comparable to a Windows computer's.
