I'm THX certified. I didn't even know you could do that in an alley...

Satan uses Intel processor, and now so does Apple. That's the idea you would get from some Apple fanboys after today's announcement that Apple will be transitioning away from IBM PowerPC processors to Intel x86 flavors.

I think this has gone much too far into a religious crusade. The POWER line, currently made by IBM for Apple, just hasn't been funded or focused enough to keep up. They have fallen behind in releasing new processor features, getting quantities ramped up, etc. With Motorola selling off their PowerPC business a few years ago, the writing was on the wall. Good for Apple hedging their bets all along by keeping OSX running on x86 as well as PPC. That's a great deal of extra work, but it paid off for them now.

I have had a love-hate relationship with Apple for a number of years. I started out on Apple's, and they really got me into computers. After the Apple IIGS though, I tried desperately not to touch an Apple for about the next 10 years. I chose to learn all the true nuts and bolts on everything from 8088's on up to the latest hyperthreaded Dell's. However, Apple snuck up on me and the rest of the world while we were distracted by something inefficient and shiny. Jobs came back with a vengeance and realized that people shouldn't care about what their computers were, or how they worked. They wanted them now to be an appliance, and one that just worked.

This is a perfect example of why they made this switch. Who really cares what processor the latest Powerbook will be running? As long as it does what the person needs. Heck, after an initial transition the developers don't really even care. It's just a different compiler, with some different flags. I've built on dozens of OS's and libraries, it's not all that difficult with semi-portable code. All of the lowest, non-portable code should be already done given that Apple has a version of the OS already running on these processors.

At this point I feel obliged to include a quote from Engadget. "So, i don't know a whole lot about the technical stuff.... but i own a powerbook...what does the switch mean to me?" Absolutely nothing you drooling idiot. You already bought your device, it's not going to quit working because they switched. When was the last time you compiled code...yeah I thought so. I hereby create a new term, derds. A derd is a wannabe-nerd who hangs out on tech sites voicing their opinion without the slightest bit of common-sense or knowledge.

Back to the matter at hand, several interesting possibilities come out of all of this. First, Apple has announced they will have tools to allow apps to run on either platform. That's really cool if they pull it off, processor emulation is always a sweet trick. I'm guessing it will not be optimal for one of the two platforms, and will probably not make use of processor extensions such as Altivec, SSE, etc. Still cool though.

Next, the dawn of a cheap Dell running OSX, or a slick mac mini running XP Media Center edition are upon us. Even if Apple tries to protect either of these interests in software, it is a simple mod chip or software patch away from working. Good for the consumer, questionable outcome for Apple.

Having thrown a bunch of stuff out here that will probably put non-techies to sleep, and may or may not be interesting, I will now throw my own opinion in. I definitely prefer PowerPC architecture. Lots of ooey, gooey registers, low power usage per performance, big-endian byte-ordering the way the programming gods intended, etc. However, I perfectly see the business reasons for Apple to switch. I can only hope now that they push Intel to become more power and heat-efficient in future designs. I will just have to deal with the pain that is little-endian some more.

Finally, just because I said I would, here is a direct quote from me: "I consider any motherboard not made by Apple or Dell to be a knock-off." I don't build computers anymore, and frankly just don't care. Suck it fanboys.