In followup statements immediately after they keynote (and widely quoted on the web) Apple has very specifically stated that OS X will NOT run on commodity Intel boxes while windows will actually be installable on Macintels. Will it be hacked? Most likely. Will it be worth the effort? I seriously doubt it. One of the (IMO) major benefits of apple is tightly integrated and controlled hardware designs leading to extremely stable systems and in my opinion, people who want to run OS X on cheap ass beige box crap systems just *don't get it* ("it" being the whole reason for using Apple). Linux is extremely stable on most commodity systems and is probably more attractive to the "hack the installer" types anyway. If I were to go hack the installer and run it on commodity hardware, I'd probably lose a great deal of that stability, and if I wanted an unstable system that crashed all the time I'd just go back to windows.

Will wine be ported? Will windows apps be runnable under MacOS? Frankly, I don't give a crap. I don't WANT to run windows apps, 99% of them are total and utter crap and the stuff I need from day to day is available in native versions or as a quick download from my local open source repository. Of course, I made the 100% switch away from Microsoft and to Linux a *long* time ago, so moving to Mac OS wasn't nearly as difficult.

In addition, I downloaded the latest updates to Xcode (the Apple-supplied developer tools which are VERY good) for the universal binary support so I can start looking at what needs to be done and in the updated developer notes it very specifically states several things, so let me clear up a few other questions:

* The architecture will be IA32.
* They are not using OpenFirmware, Macintels will have a standard BIOS
* Any code using Altivec will NOT be supported
* Any code using G4/G5 specific features will NOT be supported

There's some other gotchas in the docs that I haven't worked my way through yet, but those above items are very specifically stated. As for the IA32, it's specifically called out, but other quotes indicate they plan on moving to EMT64 "eventually". Why they didn't just go with AMD and 64 bit right out of the gate I have no idea, but they have plenty of reasons to abandon the powerPC:

* IBM failures to deliver on 3 GHz chip designs and promises to apple
* IBM mysteriously delivering 3+ GHz PowerPC chips to Sony and Microsoft (PS3 and XBox 360)
* Limited production capacities being choked out by their new console contracts
* Rampant G5 heat problems resulting in a complete inabilty to deliver faster laptops (which have surpassed desktop sales)
* the "megahertz myth" becoming a non issue as the (at least in my mind) inferior intel architecture makes up for a crappy design with sheer raw clock speed.

Am I pissed about the switch? Yes, especially since I was contemplating going out and upgrading to one of the top of the line dual CPU dream rigs very shortly and now I'm not going to buy anything for a couple of years at least, until they stabilize their design. Is it ultimately the right choice? God only knows, Apple has this tendency to completely screw over their developers it seems. Personally, I think they have COMPLETELY gutted their hardware sales for the next 2 years at least.

-- Gary F.