First Intel Macs Available!

Wednesday, 11 January 2006

Apple made it! Yesterday, at the MacWorld San Francisco, Steve Jobs proudly announced the availability of two Macs running Intel chips.

The iMac G5 is replaced by an iMac running an IntelCore Duo — a dual core processor at 2.0Ghz — with the same configuration. This iMac is said to run twice as fast as the previous G5 model.

The MacBook Pro is a brand new laptop running an IntelCore Duo at 1.8Ghz. The PowerBook line is over. According to Apple, this laptop is up to 5 times as fast as the previous PowerBooks.

These numbers are pretty impressive and still need to be confirmed by benchmarks and day to day usage. But the challenge is clearly won. With hardware also comes an upgrade of MacOS X that fully support the Intel chips. Big commercial software are not yet ported to the Intel architecture but thanx to Rosetta — a PowerPC real-time translator — each software will be able to run, waiting for the transition to be complete. Fortunately for Mac fans, Intel had the good taste to change its logo and baseline before the commercial launch of Apple products.

MacWorld was also the opportunity for Apple to announce upgrade of popular software suites: iLife and iWork.

The 10th of January 2006 will be a day to remember!

Posted in Apple

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David 2 years ago 1 point
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Wow! This sounds very bad for Motorola and IBM, yet good for potential users.

And it signals a green light to those who were postponing development of products for Mac OS X.

Also another archtectre for x86 Linux to support :)

I am mostly interested to hear if they are cool and quiet, or a little hot under the covers.

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Fred Brunel 2 years ago 1 point
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Hi David,

I didn't have yet the opportunity to try one of these new computers. I suppose there won't be any major difference from the outside.

Having an Intel architecture won't solve every problems of development. Write software for MacOS X will still be totally different from a Windows software and will requirement the same amount of work.

But virtualization software like VMware will be able to run x86 system at full speed, that's a good news.

Talking about Linux, Ubuntu already runs perfectly on PPC Macs, they have already all the drivers working. Switching to Intel won't be too hard, the system architecture is not so different.

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