Transitional Mac to use both IBM, Intel chips

By JOHN MARKOFF AND LAURIE FLYNN

THE NEW YORK TIMES



SAN FRANCISCO -- Steve Jobs took the stage at Apple Computer's Worldwide Developer Conference yesterday to tell more than 3,000 of his most enthusiastic fans -- and occasionally also his harshest critics -- that he was giving them a new homework assignment: to rework their Macintosh programs to run on chips from Intel.


Apple's decision to shift the Mac microprocessor business to Intel, a longtime rival, after more than a decade with IBM was the latest bold maneuver in his eight years back at the Apple helm, a period in which he has reinvigorated the Macintosh line and overseen Apple's ascendancy in the digital-music business.


Jobs said the company would begin incorporating Intel chips in some Macs reaching the market next year and largely complete the changeover by 2007. For the transition, Apple will offer a new version of its operating system, Macintosh OS X Tiger, that will run on both IBM and Intel chips.


One immediate challenge will be to persuade his customers to continue to buy Mac computers based on IBM's PowerPC chip while they wait for the Intel versions to arrive. But in an interview after his presentation yesterday, Jobs said he believed that Apple would be able to navigate around that obstacle.


To hear Jobs describe it, the switch was a logical and straightforward business decision.


"It didn't feel to me like a long march," he said, describing a moment several months ago when he realized he would end his relationship with IBM He said it was an obvious decision for his small team of top managers. "There was a day when we looked at each other and said, 'this is the right thing to do.' "


Indeed, it was a contingency he had been preparing for since he returned to Apple, he told the developers yesterday. He showed a satellite map of Apple's corporate headquarters and pinpointed the building where a secret engineering project, code-named Marklar, had been tuning Apple's software on Intel-powered computers bought off the shelf.


"Macintosh OS X has been leading a secret double life for the past five years," he said.


Apple had been counting on a version of the PowerPC processor that required less power and produced less heat, but had not gotten one from IBM and its partner, Freescale Semiconductor.