Apple to have intel inside

We've been organizing bloggers to cover JavaOne for us this year. One of the ones I contacted responded "I'm such a nerd, I still get excited over these things." I thought about that as I entered Steve Jobs' keynote at Apple's developer conference yesterday. These still excite me. I've seen every MacWorld and WWDC keynote that Jobs has delivered since he returned to Apple and when he has a message to deliver, no one is better.
You've heard by now about the announcement yesterday that Apple is switching from PowerPC chips to intel chips. However you feel about this decision, the way that it was delivered was masterful. First, the tension built as the audience waited for the rumors to be addressed. Then the rumor was confirmed with a slide that read "It's true". The audience groaned. What would this mean? Why would Apple risk years of foundering while they ported to yet another platform? What does a developer need to do to port to this new chip? What about products that are no longer under active development?
Maybe I'm still under the influence of the famous reality distortion field, but the answers were stunning. The first news was the for the past five years Mac OS X has worked on both PowerPC and intel. Jobs called this the "Just in case" plan. This was not some spur of the moment "maybe we should change our architecture decision". You feel, again, that someone is driving the bus and that there is direction. Also, Apple provided developers with the tools they need to make the transition: developer tools were handed out immediately and intel Macs will be available for developers in the next few weeks. They even brought out a porting success story by having Theo Gray describe the 20 lines out of millions of lines of code in Mathematica that needed changing. The third piece is Rosetta which translates PowerPC for intel boxes on the client machine. As Jobs put it, it is fast (enough).
The message was clear and the audience of developers left feeling a lot better than when they came in. A presentation worth studying.

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/editors/archives/2005/06/_apple_to_have.html