Reaction to Apple's Switch to Intel Inside Remains Mixed but Mostly Positive

following several days of additional information, thinking and reflecting--according to many published reports.

For the most part, developers attending Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, where the announcement was made, are positive. This may be in part due to the presence of Appple's engineers at the conference. Also, the extensive hands-on labs at WWDC are providing the developers the opportunity to see how easy it will be to run their applications on Rosetta, a Mac edition cross-platform portability application (QuickTransit made by Transitive Corp), or to recompile it with Xcode 2.1 and mae universal binaries so the application runs on the PowerPC and x86 Intel CPU under Mac OS X.

Only those developers whose applications take advantage of the G4 and G5 AltiVec unit (Apple calls it the Velocity Engine) like 3D games and 3D CAD applications mention concern according to various news reports. This is because Rosetta doesn't work with AltiVec and a recompile is a bit more complicated. However, Intel has similar floating point capability and Mac OS X has the Accelerate.framework. WWDC sessions will expressly address this issue with the attendees so their concern should be relieved.

Some involved in porting games to Mac OS X are concerned that sales of games for Mac OS X may decline if the Intel Macs run Windows. People may just buy the Windows version. However, there are usually extra features in the Mac versions that take advantage of special and unique Mac capabilities so this issue may be moderated.

There is a similar concern among retailers that some loss of sales may occur in the interim while Apple gears up for Macs with Intel CPUs inside. The key question is, will those in need of an upgraded computer decide to wait out and forego purchase of Macs with IBM and Freescale CPUs inside. We wouldn't expect this to be much of a problem, if a problem at all. Macs get upgraded all the time, at least every 6-9 months or so and people do not wait two years when the feel the need for more speed, features or a newer computer. In fact, many people do not buy on the bleeding edge so one might expect even greater sales from those who might "stock up" to get past the first few renditions of the Intel Macs before buying them.

Finally, every Mac user we know is either excited or neutral, mostly the former. So are the Windows users but mostly they are neutral or clueless. No one is overtly negative, at least after a bit of discussion and rumor quashing. This bodes very well for the Macs with Intel CPUs if our acquantances are representative of the general computer population. [Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]