Only for the geeks out there...

Oh... I just realized that I should mention this, as it is some of the biggest news in Apple history. Apple has announced that it will be transitioning to Intel Pentium processors over the next few years. This will be the third "major" transition for the company since its founding in the seventies. The first was the switch to the power pc processor in the mid nineties, the second was the "brain transplant" that was the switch from OS9 to OSX. If I were to say anything at Apple has been "dragging" the past few years, it would be the speed and availability of their processors. But the whole processor industry has slowed down dramatically in the past few years, so I've been excusing it. This however looks to turn that around. Apple hopes to have Intel using machines on the market by next June, and a complete changeover of their lineup by the end of 2007. The idea of this happening was so incredibly remote, that many thought it impossible. For Apple to switch their Operating System to work on a different processor would require a complete re-tooling of the entire system. The feeling out there the past few weeks in response to the rumors of an Apple/Intel partnership was "there's no way that Apple can do this... for that to happen, they would have had to have built it to be processor independant over the past 5 years... they would have had to have been planning this since OSX debuted!" Well... uh.... they did. Apple has dedicated an entire division of their company to making OSX work on Intel processors for the past 5-6 years. The switch is going to be easy. For most developers, they will be able to adapt their products to run on the new system in literally, a matter of weeks, and in some cases, days. Not that they'll need it for a year, but they have the time. In the case of applications that aren't ready or don't try to get ready by the release of the Intel run mac, Apple has created an algorythm called "Rosetta" that, get this... LIVE TRANSLATES from power pc to intel. I watched Jobs run Word, Excel, Powerpoint and a few other apps on an Intel mac, these are programs as they are today... with no tweaking, and they ran at a speed that was an almost unnoticeable difference from the norm. This is going to allow every application to be used on the new macs that was on the old, until they adapt their apps to run on the Intels themselves! Very cool. In other news, the next big cat is going to be "Leopard" and it will come out about the same time that Windows is promising to have Longhorn out by. I would not want to be that cow.

Well, that's it for the geek-fest, Ladies and Germs...

See ya.