The I-Mac Lives! No, Not the iMac but a Mac with an Intel CPU or CPUs Inside

is coming our way initially mid-2006 with a complete transition over the next two years. Yes, it's true, i.e. the latest rumor buzz which began with a speculative Wall Street Journal article last month and was followed by a solid news report Friday by CNet's Steve Shankland. Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed it in his keynote address yesterday to the largest gathering at an Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in recent history (3800+). He also confirmed the longstanding rumor of an Intel CPU skunkworks project at Apple--all Mac OS X releases over the past 5 years have been compiled for Intel CPUs.

In justifying the transition from the PowerPC to Intel CPUs, Steve Jobs stated:

"I stood up here two years ago in front of you and I promised you this [a 3.0GHz Power Mac G5] and we have not been able to deliver that to you yet. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook and we haven't been able to deliver that to you yet." He said. "When we look at future roadmaps projected out mid-2006 and beyond, what we see is the PowerPC gives us sorta 15 units of performance per watt but the Intel roadmap in the future gives us 70." He added.

It's not earth shattering news that those are precisely the bases that we raised last month and repeated in yesterday's article (below) published before the keynote.

Steve Jobs also mentioned the smooth transition from the Motorola 68xxx CPU to the PowerPC in the mid-1990's and that it was "...a good move..." for Apple as we recounted from experience earlier yesterday morning. And he added the recent OS transition from Mac OS 9 to OS X as further proof that Apple is willing and able to take on such significant transitions "...to provide [their] customers with the best personal computers in the world...."

The transition for software developers appears even easier than we had imagined. Cocoa applications need only minor tuning (a few days) and Carbon applications need only a bit more (a few weeks) and then both need to be recompiled using Apple's Xcode. The process, called making universal binaries, is much less onerous than the "Carbonizing" that was needed to move applications from OS 9 to OS X. Wolfram Research's co-founder Theo Gray demonstrated for Mathematica that just 2 hours work and 20 lines of source code were needed to get a working version using the new Xcode 2.1 released to developers at WWDC 2005.

Apple will provide software called Rosetta, a dynamic binary translator, which will allow current applications to run "as is" on Intel CPUs until they get converted. Apple will also provide a software development kit and an I-Mac to developers for a $999 "lease" since it has to be returned at the end of 2006. Steve Jobs demo'ed Microsoft Office, Intuit Quicken and Adobe Photoshop CS2 running on Rosetta on a 3.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 CPU. Testimonials followed from Microsoft, Adobe and Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini.

By the way, do we call a Mac with an Intel CPU an I-Mac, a Mactel or a Macintel? Does it matter? No. It will still be the best personal computer ever.

Steve Jobs clearly answered the questions with regard to Intel versus Freescale and IBM that we posed in yesterday's commentary. He also answered our question on edging into Intel CPUs over two years versus all at once. He did not answer some of the more detailed questions like which existing Mac line will first get an Intel CPU or if there would be a new Mac line. He also mentioned nothing about the corollary hardware opportunities like graphics but we wouldn't have expected to hear that from Apple at this point.

What about Classic mode? Is it dead? It is hard to tell at this point. While according to this CNet article, the Rosetta documentation mentions that it does not support OS 8 or OS 9 programs, this falls short of saying that Classic mode is not supported. With Apple's Phil Schiller's quoted indirect statement, the decision may be pending or may be executed in Apple's backhanded way, i.e. it works but without explicit support.

How has this announcement been received by the Mac community? We wrote that Mac users should not only be unconcerned but should rejoice at the opportunities--we are sure excited. And we hoped that developers would be supportive. It seems that both are happening, at least according to Wired News.

Here are Apple's press release and a great QuickTime video stream of Steve Jobs' keynote address. [Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]