The best of all worlds coming soon?

CNet reports that Apple is going to announce at least a partial switch to Intel processors on Monday.

I’m torn on this particular issue. I actually like the design of the PowerPC processor and I think that a viable alternative to Intel is a good thing for all of us. Ditching the x86 line is a better thing for all of us. 64-bit CPUs are better too. Thing is that Intel has gotten something like 64-bit out now, and the cheaper stuff is coming. They’re bigger, their chips run more places and I’d love to be able to buy a cheap Dell or whatever and install OS X on it.

The switch should be relatively pain free for OS X application vendors. The biggest hit will be to the more complicated applications. Games and perhaps things like Photoshop or Flash might have some optimizations that are processor specific, but in the end there’s so much abstraction between the hardware and the top layer (Cocoa/Java/etc.) that the smaller vendors especially should be able to take their source code, select the x86 target, and hit compile. Voila, out comes an x86 OS X binary. At least, in theory that would be the case… I’ll have to do some looking to see what might break. Won’t be much.