Adam Gifford: Mac fans betrayed? Not on your life

Macintosh users aren't seeing Steve Jobs' announcement that Apple is switching from IBM to Intel processors as a betrayal.

Far from it. Our response is more likely to be, "What took you so long?"

Apple's problem has long been that it saw itself as a hardware company that also happened to make some cool software.

The truth is more the other way around.

Most users don't buy hardware - they buy capabilities based on perceptions of what they need.

What is sufficient on my budget is to do emails, calculate my taxes, run Grand Theft Auto, edit home videos, do advanced maths and run an enterprise planning application.

People also don't buy Apple because it looks better than something from Dell or HP - although it often does - but because it runs an Apple operating system, easier to use, more reliable, and way more secure than Microsoft systems.

They know a sometimes-higher price will be offset by better productivity, a longer useful life, and the comfort of a near virus-free environment.

For most, the choice of processor won't matter.

Mac OS X has in its ancestry operating systems such as BSD Unix and Next, which run happily on Intel chips.

IBM didn't make a consumer line with its Power chips, saving them for its servers. That means the market for the low-end chips Apple used was Apple, and the development cycle wasn't as fast as Jobs wanted.

Apple was slipping behind on speed and processor improvements, particularly for its laptops.

Jobs hasn't said which Intel processor Apple will use, but it is unlikely to be a 32-bit Pentium. OS X is a 64-bit operating system, so maybe Intel is making Apple a version of its Xeon or Itanium chips, or even the new dual-core Pentium.

Why not AMD's Opteron chip then?

That is where the speculation gets interesting. Industry observer Robert X. Cringley suggests Apple is merging with Intel to drive a stake into the heart of Microsoft. Crazy, you say? Microsoft Windows plus Intel equals Wintel, the dominant hardware-software platform, a decades-long love-fest.

But let us not forget Intel's mantra: "Only the paranoid survive." Intel didn't like the way Microsoft buddied up to AMD, the first real threat to its dominance of the chip industry in a decade. Microsoft plus AMD equals Intel MAD.

Cringley argues Microsoft isn't coming up with anything to drive Intel sales. OS X on Intel, made available to non-Apple manufacturers, could break Microsoft's control of the desktop. Linux can't do it, but Apple might.

By tuning the operating system to take advantage of Intel-only features, AMD could be seen off, and all the value in the PC world would once more rest with Intel.

Then there is the theory Intel might buy the Alpha chip from Hewlett-Packard and revive it for the Mac. That would be cool, too.

One of the strongest reactions from the Apple user community has been to ask whether Jobs has pulled an Osborne.

In 1983, Adam Osborne announced the greatly improved next version of his luggable computer, which was several months from being shipped. Sales of the Osborne 1 came to a screaming halt, cash dried up, the company failed, and the term "Osborne Effect" was born.

So is Jobs risking a couple of billion dollars in sales for a swish demo at a developer conference?

The answer has to be no, as the reasons for buying a Mac today are the same as they were yesterday. If it does what you want it to do, it will not become obsolete in the three to five years of its expected useful life.

Meanwhile, you will have saved thousands on virus updates, patches and system maintenance.

Mac OS X users would already have said goodbye to most of their "classic" applications because the alternatives and the performance improvements justify the switch.

Where it might make a difference is for the high-end graphics of life-sciences users, where developers have written to specific features in the chip architecture to get higher performance.

There is also the question of what happens to Altivec, the dedicated vector-processing engine in the PowerPC G4 and G5 chips that gave Apple the edge in graphics. Was it all hype?

For the mass of PC users, the news is good. Innovation has been in short supply in the Intel PC space, and the addition of Apple to the mix should spice things up.
In 18 months or so you could be running Windows-OS X comparisons side by side on the same machine.