You knew it had to happen, Apple goes to Intel…

Intel Inside!

According to this announcement by Apple they are moving from the IBM PowerPC to the Intel line of processors. This is a major change in the industry and will bring Apple into direct conflict with Microsoft. This has been planned for a while…

“Mr. Jobs said Apple has been working on a Intel-ready version of Mac OS X for the last five years and said, “I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel.” – quote in context

And while in the end Apple may only ship 64 bit Intel chips in it’s computers, OSX apparently runs just fine on x86 architectures.

“Mr. Jobs demonstrated a version of Mac OS X running on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 system. He showed version 10.4.1 of Max OS X running Apple Mail, Safari, iPhoto, Spotlight and a variety of Dashboard widgets.” – quote in context

Some links:

• A live coverage blog of the Keynote speech
•  More than 1,900 comments already on the “Spymac” forums!
• The Mac Observer has an article available on the topic as well