14 DAY TRIAL // After a weekend filled with news regarding Apple's move towards Intel, coming from all sorts of sources, Jobs finally made the official announcement, confirming the information provided by CNET as early as Friday night.
By the end of 2007, all the models manufactured by Apple will be using Intel processors. Thus ends a 14 years old partnership with IBM, a relationship that was already on the brink of collapse.
During his speech at Worldwide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs announced the release of the Developer Transition Kit, which will be used for porting the applications onto the new processors.
The consequences of this announcement are far too complex to be even imagined. For Intel, it's a major image booster, Apple being one the most important computer manufacturers that chooses to get an "Intel inside".
For Apple, it's very hard to say what was on Jobs's mind when he made this decision, and the 5% market share currently owned by the company in Cupertino could be at risk.
But one certainty raises a thousand questions: if Mac OS X will run on Intel processors, why wouldn't it run also on AMD? And if it will be Intel-compatible, are PCs the next logical step? What's Apple really aiming at here? And what about Microsoft?