WWDC: Freedom of architecture

Like many Macintosh afficionados, I’ve been following the developments at Apple’s World-Wide Developer Conference as reported in the blogosphere. It’s funny that the most talked about development is Apple’s impending move away from Motorola’s PowerPC chips to Intel’s x86 chips. The possibility has been discussed for years, and for that reason many did not believe the rumors until they were actually confirmed by Steve Jobs. He finally acknowledged what had also been rumored for years – that Apple had been secretly running OS X on an x86 chipset since Mac OS X 10.0 shipped. My favorite quote is from my old friend Rainer Brokerhoff:

Now, suddenly, the handed-down wisdom is that the Pentium still sucks – but it sucks much faster than the current G5 does. The mobile varieties suck less power while still sucking faster than the aging G4. The dual-core Pentium sucks doubly well while the dual-core G5s are still in IBM’s and Motorola’s labs.

How’s that for a backhanded compliment

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