I suppose it’s getting boring by now. So much has been written about Apple’s transition to Intel processors that I doubt there’s much more to say. Indeed, I was reluctant to dive in with further discussion, but a few things are still nagging me. First and foremost, whether you should be an early adopter. No doubt many of you will be champing a the bit, waiting for the first Macs with Intel Inside to go on sale. I’m sure the news will come with the appropriate flair and flourish for which Apple is known. It’s also possible the new computers will feature distinct redesigns to separate them from the previous models, or perhaps not.

Do you recall the first Macs with PowerPC chips? I remember buying one of the last 68040 models, the Quadra 800, in 1993. The following year, Apple introduced the Power Macintosh 8100. If you didn’t look too closely at the model designation, you probably couldn’t tell them apart, since they used the same cases. Open the box and you encountered the same misbegotten layout, where you had to pull the motherboard to change RAM. Start it up and, yes, it still worked like a Mac. In fact, if anything, it seemed somewhat slower than the model it replaced, simply because there was little, if any, native PowerPC software available.

At this early stage, I’m sure Apple has different industrial designs for its new MacIntels, or whatever you want to call them, undergoing testing in one or more of those secret repositories at One Infinite Loop. Perhaps Steve Jobs and his crew are wondering if they should take the same approach, to symbolize that the new processor is just a natural progression from existing models. This may impart a sense of familiarity. It’s still a Mac, and it still runs Mac OS X, and, assuming there is enough updated software available, it’ll just be faster. Compare that to moving from a G4 to a G5, and you’ll get the picture.

On the other hand, today’s Apple may be tempted to make a fashion statement, to stake out new territory, demonstrate that it’s entering a new era in which Macs deliver previously unheard of performance. So you’ll see new lines of Macs that look daringly different, distinct, conveying the clear message of the new order.

Final decisions may not come for a while, although the rumor mills will be buzzing big time in the coming months.

Another major factor in the transition is how software publishers will handle the upgrades to Universal Binaries. If you take Steve Jobs at face value, and he is known to, well, stretch the boundaries, it’ll be a cake walk for many developers. I’ve already read a blog here and there indicating that some programs may only require a few hours of work to be compatible. If that’s the case, then the new versions ought to be available free, or, worst case scenario, for a $9.95 or $19.95 fee for the new CDs, plus shipping and handling. If the updates require only minor modifications, perhaps a downloadable updater is sufficient.

Applications that are built with lots of legacy code, going back to the Classic Mac OS era, may present far greater obstacles. It may take months of hard work to deliver a reliable update, taking maximum advantage of both the PowerPC and Pentium. Publishers facing this daunting task will be tempted to charge for a full version upgrade. Consider the first Mac OS X version of Microsoft Office, which only had a handful of new features, yet exacted the the standard upgrade fee. Quark Inc. pulled very much the same stunt with XPress 6.0, although 6.1 and 6.5, both free updates with new features, have lessened the pain somewhat.

I can well believe that both Adobe and Microsoft will deliver Universal Binary versions of their flagship applications as promised. No doubt Microsoft will hold out for the next version of Office to deliver the goods. On the other hand, Adobe may not wait for the inevitable CS 3 upgrade. As you may recall, when the PowerPC first appeared, there was a free plugin for Photoshop that allowed some filters to run native and thus enhance performance. Ditto for the G4’s Velocity Engine. These were stopgaps until full version upgrades arrived, but grand gestures nonetheless. I expect that InDesign and Illustrator will run well enough in emulation not to require immediate updates to run native on the x86 Intel processor, but it would be nice to see an interim Photoshop update, even if it is, as before, limited to the most processor heavy filters.

The final part of the equation is how Apple will handle those frequent updates to Intel processors. While it has taken from six months to a year for a new Mac with a faster G4 or G5 to appear, the Pentium exists in a different, faster moving time zone. Windows power users, some of whom simply build their PCs from scratch using industry standard components, are used to replacing processors on a fairly frequent basis. So long as the support chips don’t change, it’s just a matter of unplugging one processor and plugging in its faster replacement. Sure, you can upgrade the processor on a number of Macs even today, but these upgrades aren’t officially supported by Apple.

Assuming Apple is going to use standard, off-the-shelf Intel processors, that situation may be poised for a big change. As it did once before for a short period of time, maybe Apple will once again sell boxed processor upgrades, officially supported. And perhaps the third party suppliers of today’s Mac upgrades will even find economical ways to make a PowerPC receive an Intel Inside brain transplant.

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As developers begin to sort out what they really have to do to make their products run on both the PowerPC and Intel processors, the rest of the Mac universe might just be worrying what has really happened here. For so long, Intel was seen as the enemy, part of the great conspiracy, led by Microsoft, to dominate the PC industry and sweep all comers aside. Now Steve Jobs is telling us that Intel is our friend.

Taking emotions out of the picture, there’s the fundamental question: What makes a Mac a Mac? On the surface that seems an easy question. Combine cutting edge design with a first class, user friendly, operating system. It’s so obvious, why should I even bother to ask? But it’s not that simple, and the issue may seem more cloudy when you ponder the implications of Apple’s latest processor shift strategy.

In the early days, a Mac had a Motorola processor, beginning with the 68000 and ending with the 68040. Peripheral ports included SCSI for hard drives, and NuBus for expansion cards. The Mac OS reigned supreme as the best graphical operating system on the planet. But in 1994, Apple began to phase out its existing processor chips, and began the transition to PowerPC. At the same time, developers had to reinvent their products, making software compatible with the new order, and it wasn’t always easy. In fact, it ended up taking a year or two, and perhaps longer, to make the switch; some just gave up and switched to Windows and a much larger market. At first, applications were shipped as “fat binaries,” meaning they supported both the 680×0 and PowerPC architectures. An emulator was included on those new computers to allow you to run older software. In the end, however, the Power Mac was still a Mac, no question about it. Despite the changes underneath, the operating system still looked the same.

The following year, NuBus was phased out and replaced with PCI, an expansion card technology that had also been embraced by the Dark Side. The upshot? Well, where you once had to pay upwards of two thousand dollars for a high performance graphics card, the price went down considerably. You benefited by the economies of scale. By 1998, with the arrival of the iMac, Apple adopted USB as the standard serial port, and the following year essentially ditched SCSI (except as an option) and embraced FireWire for external drives, scanners and other devices.

And, despite all the changes, your Mac was still a Mac.

Do you recall the brief era of the Mac OS clone? Apple licensed several companies, giving them the right to stuff Apple-designed motherboards and other circuitry into cheap PC, anonymous looking PC boxes. Yes, it looked a little generic, but when all was said and done, you still used the same operating system, and when you looked at your monitor, you knew you were still using a Mac, even if it was built by a different company.

From System 1.0 to Mac OS 9, there was never a doubt in your mind. Despite subtle enhancements in the look and feel, and a bulging feature set, you knew you still had a Mac.

The arrival of Mac OS X may have seemed rather jarring in the scheme of things. Yes, you still had a desktop, folders and an Apple menu, you interacted with the operating system in pretty much the same way, but it looked so different. And beneath the graphical veneer lay the arcane, command line world of Unix. In fact, despite the use of the word Mac, the new operating system bore very little resemblance to the old.

Now maybe some of you had difficulty accepting that degree of change, but you never felt the need to question whether or not you still had Mac. Well, I suppose that applies to most of you, although others regarded it as a great conspiracy in which the NeXT operating system supplanted the real Mac OS right before our eyes.

No matter. Now we are poised for an even greater change in the scheme of things, and that is the end of the PowerPC, and the beginning of the Intel Inside era. You used to laugh at that silly Intel stinger on a Dell or Gateway commercial. Who really cares, and, besides, doesn’t the PowerPC smoke the Pentium in virtually every single benchmark? Besides, aren’t those Pentiums too hot anyway?

But the truth was really out there for quite some time now, only we didn’t see it, or didn’t want to see it. Steve Jobs wanted to have options, and so there was a parallel development of Mac OS X on Intel processors, just in case. Motorola and its processor spin-off, Freescale, were perennially late to the party in delivering faster chips in sufficient qualities to Apple. With the arrival of the G5 from IBM, Steve Jobs said things would be different, that we’d see a 3GHz version by the summer of 2004.

Instead, the chips didn’t scale up near as fast as expected, and getting them in sufficient quantities remained difficult. The fastest Macs now require liquid cooling systems to keep the processors from frying, and putting a G5 in a PowerBook remains the “mother of all thermal challenges.” At the same time, Intel has continued to tame its Pentium to deliver high performance with low power consumption in a laptop computer.

By the end of 2007, all new Macs will have Intel processors. If all goes as planned, they will have all the advanced features you expect, such as dual cores, superb performance, low power consumption, and they will ship on time, in sufficient quantities to build all the computers Apple can sell. If Steve Jobs is even half right in his promises during Monday’s keynote, developers will be able to build Universal Binaries, software that supports the PowerPC and Pentium, in days, weeks or perhaps a few months at most. Mac OS X will still be Mac OS X. It will look the same, and it will run only on Apple’s computers. Despite all the changes inside, the Mac will still be a Mac, and that won’t change for a long, long time.

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