ApTel

I just finished watching Steve Jobs's WWDC keynote address. He managed to make the transition from Power PC to Intel CPUs look fairly innocuous. Certainly it'll be less of a hassle than the move from OS 9 to OS X. The trick he pulled where he did all of his demos on an Intel based Mac before announcing the move was exemplary. It looks like he'll have developer backing, and I'm comfortable with Rosetta and its method of assuring backward compatibility of software.

I doubt Apple will make the move, however, of porting OS X onto all Wintel machines. Apple's main advantage is that it builds its OS for a limited number of devices. Thus it avoids a lot of the compatibility problems that plague Windows. If Apple took on those issues, it would lose one of its major selling points against XP and (eventually at some point in the far, far future) Longhorn.

I also doubt Apple will have to deal much with clone-makers. I don't think it was ever the CPU that made Apple technology proprietary. Power PC chips have shown up in lots of other devices, including game machines and, for die-hards, the Amiga. (Though there are also Amigas, as I understand it, that run on Intel chips). I'm sure Apple has lots of proprietary elements in their systems to frustrate cloners, and the switch to Intel won't make much difference.