“I guess Apple will move to Intel, and they’re relying on a fast, seamless emulator to do it. But it’s really about Hollywood: Apple’s looking to transform the movie industry the same way the iPod and iTunes changed the music business,” Leander Kahney writes for The Cult of Mac Blog for Wired News. “As initially reported, there a couple of big problems with Apple moving to Intel. The biggest is shifting all the Mac software to a new platform. Apple apparently mulled moving to Intel a few years ago, when Motorola’s chip development fell woefully behind, but Steve Jobs nixed it because of the massive disruption it would cause developers.”
Kahney writes, “What’s new this time is a fast, transparent, universal emulator from Transitive, a Silicon Valley startup. Transitive’s QuickTransit allows any software to run on any hardware with no performance hit, or so the company claims… But why would Apple do this? Because Apple wants Intel’s new Pentium D chips. Released just few days ago, the dual-core chips include a hardware copy protection scheme that prevents ‘unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard,’ according to PC World. Apple — or rather, Hollywood — wants the Pentium D to secure an online movie store (iFlicks if you will), that will allow consumers to buy or rent new movies on demand, over the Internet. According to News.com, the Intel transition will occur first in the summer with the Mac mini, which I’ll bet will become a mini-Tivo-cum-home-server.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Jobs’ WWDC keynote doesn’t hurry the hell up, we might completely lose our minds! Oh, and if Jobs is planning to subject Mac users to a switch to Intel just so Apple can sell and rent movies online, he’d better have a nice thick protective vest on underneath that mock turtleneck.
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