The Back of Tuor's Head

With Apple's recent announcement that they are adopting Intel's cpus into newer Macintoshes, there have been a lot of opinions and speculation. These fall into a few general groups:

1) Woe is me! PPC is a superior architecture.
2) Yay! More 1337 p0w3r!
3) Wild speculation about compatibility, pirating and gaming

What they miss is probably the most important part: it's Apple's ace in the hole.

Think about it for a moment. If you were a big company like Apple, would you put all your eggs in one basket? Apple was part of the PPC alliance, with Motorola and IBM under the hopes that having two suppliers would incite competition and keep their CPUs equal or better then the competition.

Steve knew when he came back that while having great cards on the table was a good idea, Intel had another great hand; and he needed an ace in the hole. So he continued to develop the x86 port of OSX under wraps, with controlled leaks, to keep IBM and Motorola interested in pushing the envelope for them.

I believe this is the crux of the announcement. Remember, IBM didn't officially find out until shortly before we did. Apple was snubbing its nose at them; saying "Fine, if you're not interested, we'll take our business elsewhere. We're not as afraid to do it as you thought."

IBM recently announced the low-power and faster versions of PPC chips Apple had wanted, and I bet they're working on more. IBM and to a lesser extent Motorola need Apple in ways that aren't obvious.

Primarily, they need the CPU advocacy and the enthusiast experience that a desktop CPU can afford, especially IBM. IBM has been betting itself on PPC Linux on small to mid-range servers. These ports have of course come from the community porting the OS themselves. Mostly on Macs, but also on Amiga & derivatives. (Not to exclude the few true Linux PPC boxes, but these of course came after the initial port.)

Without Apple, IBM is out of the desktop market. They loose their "Street Cred" as it were. They chance becoming a footnote in the processor wars; a lost architecture like the 68000 series, the 6502 or the Z80. Other companies, like Amiga and PegasOS are dependent on Apple too. When Apple drops PPC, they must also, or face a CPU with no future.

What does the future hold then? Well, either Apple is committed to Intel (Doubtful), or playing the field, seeing who shows up with the best CPUs (my bet). The future really is up to IBM and Motorola. If they step up to the plate, whether for financial, publicity, or other intangibles, Apple may continue to be a dual-chip platform for years to come and everyone uses fat binaries. (They did for years until OSX shipped.)

Whats really going on right now is that Apple has been letting its partners rule the roost, they were in the weaker position up to this point, but now Apple is whipping out the big stick and letting everyone know who's boss.