WWDC 2005: Intel and Leopard

Keynote just ended. The shocking (shocking) news is that Apple is working on Intel-based Macs to ship sometime within the next year. Select and Premiere developers can get a porting "kit" -- which includes a 3.6GHz Intel-based development machine -- for $999.


Intel Details

Apple calls this its third major transition, the first two being 68k to PowerPC and Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. This provides context for the recent positive comments from Intel's CEO about Apple's products. He seems to be genuinely excited about all of this, which really gave the announcement a different flavor.

The transition to Intel-based chips will take place over the course of two years. Some machines will be on the market by next June, with most Macs using Intel chips by June 2007. The transition is planned to be complete by the end of that year.

Keep in mind that this does not mean that Mac OS X will run on any random piece of x86 hardware. Apple designs hardware and software together, as a single complete product.

As many knew/suspected, Apple's engineering teams have been maintaining both PowerPC and x86 versions of their project for quite some time. In other words, Mac OS X essentially works on Intel-based machines today, which was demoed during the keynote.

The porting process for third parties various by framework. Cocoa apps should have it pretty easy. This comes as no surprise since the NeXT technology Cocoa is based on was designed to run on multiple architectures. Most Cocoa apps will need "tweaks" and a recompile.

Carbon apps on Xcode will take more work, though it really depends on the project. Most critically, Carbon apps using the CodeWarrior workflow need to transition to Xcode. According to Apple, 56% of their top 100 developers are using Xcode, with an additionally 25% in the process of transitioning to it.

Xcode 2.1 -- which is available to developers at the conference -- can build "universal binaries." The idea is that you can distribute a single app package that will run on whatever architecture it's installed on.

Finally, to compensate for applications that will take longer to port, Apple is working on an emulation layer called Rosetta. It dynamically translates PowerPC binaries to Intel instruction sets as they run. The nice thing is that the translation is transparent. In other words, there isn't a separate emulation environment like Classic.

Numbers

Apple has sold 2 million copies of Tiger in its first six weeks of sales, and 16% of the entire Mac user base already has it installed. About 49% is on Panther (10.3), 25% on Jaguar (10.2) and about 10% are using Mac OS 9 or earlier.

Mac sales grew at 3x the industry average over the last few months.

Apple has sold 16 million iPods, and the iTunes store has sold 430 million songs. iPod has a 76% market share of all MP3 players, and the iTunes store has 82% market share.

This WWDC has approximately 3,800 attendees which is the biggest number in recent memory (about ~22% more than last year, I think). ADC has over 500,000 registered developers.

There are now 109 Apple Retail stores, which get around 1 million visitors per week. Apple has sold around $500 million in third party products in the stores in the last year.

Music

The next version of iTunes will have built-in podcasting support, and the iTunes store will have a podcast directory for easy subscriptions. The demo of Apple's "new music Tuesday" was particularly impressive, as the iTunes app displayed information about the album that is being discussed at any given moment.

Leopard!

Leopard is the official name for the next version of Mac OS X, and it's schedule to ship around the same time as Longhorn.
Design Element
WWDC 2005: Intel and Leopard
Posted Jun 6, 2005 — 8 comments below




 

Brian Christensen — Jun 06, 05 200

I wish someone could pinch me right now because I can't believe they did this. If they had at least chosen a more sensible ISA than crusty old x86. Blech, I'm not excited at all.

Dale — Jun 06, 05 201

Strange they didn't mention more about Leopard. Is it just going to be Tiger with Intel spots?

Adrian — Jun 06, 05 202

I think this is great for expanding Mac OS X in areas where it is not so used: for example, Latin America. Users are more used to Intel hardware down there, and besides Linux, they do not have choices to the Wintel platform... which is prone to virus, crashes, business loss... This is great, even if I am puzzled that they chose Pentium instead of the Itanium...

Scott Stevenson — Jun 06, 05 203 Scotty the Leopard

1. As far as I know, nobody has talked about exactly <i>which</i> Intel chip will be used in the Macs that actually ship to customers. We'll see what happens.

2. Tiger already runs on Intel machines, so Leopard will be an entirely new major release, not just Intel compatibility.

3. Keep in mind this is *not* Mac OS X for generic x86 hardware. In other words, you can't just take a Windows machine and install Mac OS X on it. Apple sells computers, not operating systems.

Jussi — Jun 07, 05 204

Dale, Leopard is at least a year and a half away, Tiger is out NOW. It would have been quite silly to talk much about it, I assume Apple does not know yet themselves exactly what the Leopard will look like.

Dale — Jun 07, 05 206

Jussi, wasn't Tiger about a year and a half away from release when it was announced? They would have to have some goals for Leopard so I'd expect them to talk about these in general terms. As they haven't I believe Intel compatibility will be the main 'feature' and user features less prominent. That's just my reading of the lack of info. But we'll wait and see.

Jussi — Jun 07, 05 209

Dale, no. If my memory serves me Tiger was announced a year ago in WWDC 2004 so it was just 11 months away. Apple probably hoped to ship it a bit earlier. They'll talk about that next year, developers will have the time to do the changes needed and hype won't die before launch. And perhaps most importantly, Leopard hype won't cannnibalise sales of Tiger <Smile>

Scott Stevenson — Jun 07, 05 210 Scotty the Leopard

Tiger has only been out for about six weeks, so it wouldn't be a good idea to muddy the waters for users and developers by focusing on the next release. This is even more true with upcoming support for Intel-based Macs.

This year is about going deep on all the new stuff in Tiger (there's plenty of material to work with), Xcode 2.1 and preparing for Intel. Next's years conference will almost certainly focus on Leopoard.

Tiger already runs just fine on Intel, so there will be much more to Leopard than that




 

Comments Temporarily Disabled

I had to temporarily disable comments due to spam. I'll re-enable them soon.





Copyright © Scott Stevenson 2004-2015