Mac transition to Intel processors: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:46, 14 June 2005

Revision as of 16:48, 14 June 2005

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Jobs began by examining the previous transitions successfully completed during the Macintosh's lifetime. The first, itself a processor transition, migrated the platform from the [[68K]] series of chips from Motorola to their new generation of [[PowerPC]] parts developed jointly with Apple and IBM.

More recently Apple has transitioned the [[operating system]] for their computers from [[OS 9]] to a modern [[Unix]]-like operating system known as [[Mac OS X]]. OS X was derived from [[NeXTSTEP]] which was bought by Apple for the purpose, and [[FreeBSD]] which is what everything except the [[GIUGUI]] is based upon. OS X now includes features such as [[pre-emptive multitasking]], lacking in previous versions of the OS, as well as a [[graphical user interface]] that devotees of the platform believe represents the real "heart" of the Mac. For these users, the nature of the processor powering the system is of less consequence than having an OS that for them improves the speed with which they can accomplish tasks.

A long-rumoured internal project within Apple, known as "[[Marklar]]" was designed to ensure that builds of Mac OS X were sufficiently [[cross-platform]] as to compile for both PowerPC and x86-class processors. Jobs confirmed at the conference that every version of OS X had been thus compiled, continuing the cross-platform tradition of NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD. It is not known what other processors, if any, Apple maintains current builds for.