RIP Power PC - Apple Computers announces move to Intel based processors.

RIP Power PC June 6th 2005
Today at WWDC Apple computers officially announced that they will be moving all of their desktop / laptop personal computer's from their current CPU vendor IBM to Intel.

This is a shocking move to say the least.

If the processor is a computer's soul, than I think its safe to say Apple just sold the Mac's soul to the devil.

It will be very interesting to see how Apple will combat people attempting to port the Mac OS to cheaper PC hardware. (up until now one the greatest obstacles to this has been the fact that Mac's run on a completely different architecture than PC's) There is an emulator named Rosetta that Apple plans to leverage as "a universal, on-the-fly software that allows Mac to run on Intel chips with no need to rewrite the application with little or no performance hit."

Other than the risks such a move will pose to endangering the culture behind the diehard Mac loyal, there are larger concrete issues a decision like is going to introduce. This will definitely cause developers to re-evaluate their relationships with Apple. (Although Adobe has already announced they will be developing versions of their digital imaging software that will support this move to x86)

I find it terribly ironic that this comes a week after I took the plunge and purchased my first Mac. I guess I'm going to be the owner of one of the last "true" Macs...