Nobody could have missed the news. A couple of weeks ago Apple announced that they would switch its products to the Intel x86 architecture in 2006. It was an earthquake in the Mac community but also in the whole computer industry. That’s sure big change but it was funny to see that the Mac community was emotionally shocked, it has nothing to do with a technical point of view of some sort. At first, the community just felt it has been betrayed. I also noticed that Steve Jobs was very careful in his words at the WWDC keynote and when he made the announce, you could have heard a fly in the theater. But the Apple move is smart and strategic, Steve Jobs made an interesting decision and he could afford it because of OS X.

During the last decades, Apple only communicates about the CPU superioty of its systems and suprisingly not about software. Actually, everybody knew that Apple made simple-to-use products but the ads were about CPU things — remember the toasting of the Intel guy? Anyway, Steve said something right. The heart of the Mac is now OS X and not the CPU anymore. The objective of Apple is not to make the most powerful computer available but to build the best computer system for the rest of us. That makes the Intel move right and actually, most users didn’t get the Megahertz war and didn’t care. Now, the debate is closed, every desktop computer will be based on the same architecture, final dot. The next fight will be on software quality, integration and ease of use and we know where Apple stands in that regard.

For geeks, the G5 was a great CPU, I admit it, but IBM is just not in the same business as Intel and they will be very busy providing the CPUs for next-gen consoles. With customers like Sony and Microsoft, IBM will produce only one generation of CPU each 3 or 4 years, that’s not fast enough for desktop computing. In the next couple of years, Intel will be able to produce pretty impressive chips with up to 32 cores, a thing IBM won’t be able to do. Intel will soon catch up with the G5, its Pentium M architecture is promising and will replace the P4 NetBurst architecture. Pentium M will use less power and lower frequently but will be as powerful as P4 running full speed. Chances are that Apple products will be based on Pentium M chips, 64 bits and multi-core.

That makes me very excited and positive for the future. Apple is strong and that’s the perfect time for the Intel transition. I’m sure Apple engineer will make the most of the PC architecture. After all, BeOS have done it years before, it was very impressive and smooth. I suppose the biggest problem with PC is the lack of good software engineering to make it dance. And it just found its masters.