The Hindu : Business : `Intel-inside' Apple Macs too

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jun 08, 2005

Business

Business

`Intel-inside' Apple Macs too

Anand Parthasarathy

Complete transition by 2007-end

BANGALORE: The rumours were floating around for a week now, that Apple had been caught `sleeping with the enemy' — and finally in the early hours of Tuesday, Indian time, they were confirmed: CEO Steve Jobs told attendees at the annual Apple Developers Conference in San Francisco that the company was shifting its Macintosh computer line to the Intel processor family, ditching the IBM Power PC platform it had been using since 1994.

Wrenching change

It will be a wrenching change for Apple's fiercely loyal, but numerically small, customer base: They had stuck loyally with every transition made by the company since it created the world's first personal computer in the early 1980s, with a Motorola chip under the hood. In fact, the so-called IBM PC — a machine based on Intel chips and Microsoft software — that 90 percent of computer owners use, was an imitation of the tabletop platform pioneered by Apple.

But the need to increase its presence in the PC arena from something like 6-8 percent — or die — seems to have forced the hurried `divorce' from the PowerPC processor. The IBM chips have not matched the Intels and the Advanced Micro Devices when it came to speed. In recent months, Apple had a hard time selling its tech-savvy customers the story that a 2 GHz PowerPC was somehow better than a 3 GHz Pentium. Suddenly, Apple which has consistently touted the superiority of its 64-bit G5 PowerPC platform over just about every thing else, is singing a different tune, hailing Intel as ``the most innovative personal computer company.''

It will deliver the first "Intel-inside" Macs in 2006 and make a complete transition by end 2007. Which Intel chip will it use? Apple is not saying; but the smirks on the face of Intel executives have been translated by analysts to mean Apple will be an early customer for the new dual-core Pentiums that Intel has unleashed for both desktop and server in recent weeks.

While industry is still assessing Apple's logic, one interesting theory is going the rounds: "Wired News" suggests the change might be part of a plan to enlarge the only significant market segment where Apple still rules — the high-end graphics and animation business.

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