You probably all know it so I will not tell the story again, Apple switched to the Intel CPU.
At first I was shocked. The rumors were old and the same each year so I did not believe them. I did not like the idea of having the Intel CPUs in Mac because of the better design of the PowerPC CPU and because of fear of the transition (apart from favoring AMD and their Opteron over the Pentium 4).
After seeing the keynote and reading some early comments I began to accept and think of it as something good for the Mac community. The Intel Pentium M processor is a very fast and cool processor compared with the G5 or even the G4. Steve Jobs said that they looked at the “Performance per Watt” ratio of the PowerPC and the Pentium and missing a faster PowerBook myself it could follow the rationale. As a UNIX OS compiled with GCC and Darwin already working on x86, there is no Problem to migrate OS X to x86. In fact OS X boots on x86 since its beginning.
With Rosetta and the Transition Kit, getting most applications to work on both PowerPC and x86 within a year seems doable. So I began to develop a kind of pleasant anticipation and looked forward to faster and cheaper Macs.
Now, after reading some more comments and thinking more about the transition, I more and more dislike it.
With the transition, diversity is shrinking but diversity is a good thing for security. How many people do you know who can write PowerPC shellcode/assembly and how many do you know that write some for x86? Porting vulnerabilities is getting easier.
Mac OS X will get access to such wonderful things like Trusted Computing and DRM built into the CPU.
Porting is also not as easy as Apple told us. Objectve-C will behave annoyingly different on Intel than it did on PowerPC due to GCC/Pentium (division by zero and sending messages to nil).
Further it will strengthen many opensource developers in their believe that the the opensource world is Linux/x86. Already many wannabes write code that assumes x86 (and Linux). This will not ease the life of maintainer of “exotic platforms” like OpenBSD/Sparc or NetBSD/arm.
So I went from shock, to anticipation to displeasure. Always fun, the WWDC keynotes.
