It has already been some information from different news sources that Apple and Intel are working hard under the mutual cooperation agreement in the field of Mac PCs and Intel chips integration. It was mostly unofficial information, which, however, finally turned to be true.
On May 6 at the Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple officially announced its plans to move Macintosh personal computers to the chips made by Intel. The company is planning to release the first Macintosh computers with Intel microprocessors within a year and completely move all Apple PCs to Intel chips by the year 2007. This appeared to be really big news in the computer world. Two companies - Intel and Apple, world known leaders in their fields, developing the most up-to-date IT solutions, decided to work together to provide consumers with the most advanced personal computer.
For years, Intel developed its microprocessor chips, which were initially designed for work on the Microsoft Windows platform. Apple at the same time provided its Macintosh computers with IBM Power PC chips. Intel has always been a true leader in chip making industry, while Apple has always provided high-grade computers with unique hardware configuration and elegant Apple OS X operating system. Now two leaders has announced about their cooperation, which may result in producing the best personal computer in the world, as it is promised by Apple official representatives.
At the beginning, the customers are not likely to feel much difference between Power PC and Intel Macs, while the exterior of Apple computers will not change. The use of Intel chips is planned to help building a Macintosh which will run faster and better, and have a longer battery life, which is especially crucial for laptop computers. New Intel based Apple computers will run the same Apple OS X Tiger, which is for the time being the most innovative operating system.
In terms of software, it should be noted that developers will have to work on the development of new versions of applications to run on new Macs. To help them in solving this problem, Apple has also announced the availability of specially designed transition tool - Developer Transition Kit, aimed to help developers to upgrade their software applications to run on both Power PC and Intel based Mac computers. Interesting that Apple is not denying officially the possibility to run Microsoft Windows on its new PCs, but obviously it will not be so easy to run this operating system, due to the great difference in computer system configuration. Meantime, it is possible that Microsoft will release special edition of Windows to run on new Intel Macintosh computers.
Many market analysts foresee that the cooperation between Apple and Intel is likely to give a new push to the overall development of computer manufacturing industry. In spite of relatively small market share of Macintosh computers in comparison to Intel Pentium, the influence of Apple Corporation on the trends in IT technologies can hardly be underestimated. Today Apple is known all over the world for its innovative desktop and notebook computers, OS X operating system, portable iPod music players and iTunes online music project.