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Looks like I don’t get to be smug. It’s rather hard to tell, since all the sites offering live updates from the ongoing WWDC keynote are basically maxed-out, but it sounds like Apple are moving the Mac to Intel processors exclusively, with the first machines appearing next June and the transition being complete late 2007. ‘Leopard,’ Mac OS X 10.5, is due in the middle of that timeframe.

Yikes.

OK, I’ve found an accessible feed:

There’s a ‘completely transparent’ emulation layer called Rosetta (uh… wasn’t that codename used for the Newton’s handwriting recognition system?), fat – excuse me – universal binaries are indeed the application delivery system, the cross-compiling Xcode 2.1 is available today. Rosetta has been demonstrated running Excel, Quicken and Photoshop PPC binaries on an Intel Mac (but note that it’s not clear if Rosetta works in the other direction too – ie. x86 emulation on a PPC).

The only new product so far is what’s likely to be the most sought-after Mac on the black market ever: a 3.6GHz Pentium-based developer-only unit, sold for $999, available in two weeks and to be returned at the end of 2006. Heh.

Microsoft and Adobe are on board, by the sound of things. Well, they’d have to be, really. And Mathematica was ported in something like two hours.

And that’s it. That’s all the keynote news. Wow. For once, it really was developer-only.

As for the rest of us… hmm. My lumbering old desktop G4/933 will have to soldier on for another year or so. Buying a dual G5 right now would probably be a good idea, but come the end of the year or early 2006… well, one might as well wait for a multicore PIV. And I’d best budget for a round of software upgrades, too, ugh. But otherwise… I guess it doesn’t make much difference. Weird.

As a sometime member of the Malet Lambert School Hypothetical Upper Sixth Form Physics Poetry Reading Circle, I’ve long held the deepest admiration for Scotland’s second most-famous poet, William Topaz McGonagall (Wikipedia article). His seminal work, The Tay Bridge Disaster, merely hints at the depth of talent and breadth of his work, my personal favourite being the spectacular Attempted Assassination of the Queen:

God prosper long our noble Queen,
And long may she reign!
Maclean he tried to shoot her,
But it was all in vain.

For God He turned the ball aside
Maclean aimed at her head;
And he felt very angry
because he didn’t shoot her dead.

There’s a divinity that hedgeth a king,
And so it does seem,
And my opinion is, it has hedged
Our most gracious Queen.

Maclean must be a madman,
Which is obvious to be seen,
Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot
Our most beloved Queen.

Victoria is a good Queen,
Which all her subjects know,
And for that God has protected her
From all her deadly foes.

She is noble and generous,
Her subjects must confess;
There hasn’t been her equal
Since the days of good Queen Bess.

Long may she be spared to roam
Among the bonnie Highland floral,
And spend many a happy day
In the palace of Balmoral.

Because she is very kind
To the old women there,
And allows them bread, tea, and sugar,
And each one to get a share.

And when they know of her coming,
Their hearts feel overjoy’d,
Because, in general, she finds work
For men that’s unemploy’d.

And she also gives the gipsies money
While at Balmoral, I’ve been told,
And, mind ye, seldom silver,
But very often gold.

I hope God will protect her
By night and by day,
At home and abroad
When she’s far away.

May He be as a hedge around her,
As He’s been all along,
And let her live and die in peace
Is the end of my song.

I’m particularly fond of the seventh verse.

But now, I read a scandalous theory purporting to be of academic extraction, to the effect that McGonagall may not have been a serious poet after all, but in fact a sly and mischievous performance artist merely purporting to be a serious poet for comic effect. There shall be thunder in the Highlands at this slight and slur, I assure you, and no stone shall be left unturned to unearth the perpetrator of such vile and insidious perfidy!

Comments for this blog are finally back – hurrah! – and I feel compelled to link to the Einstein Project, the Newton hardware emulator that’s in far heavier development than seems plausible for a platform that officially died eight years ago. Hmm… must get my 2100 running again, I miss it…

For the sake of clarity – and because, if I turn out to be right, I want to be in a position to claim Ultimate Smugness^™ – I’d like to restate my prediction for WWDC today:

I reckon Intel’s getting into the operating system business, by licensing Mac OS X. They’ll ship a custom version for very specific Pentium-based systems, targeted at corporate desktops. Apple will enable cross-compiling to fat binaries in an update to Xcode, and emulation layers will cope with everything else, with the likely and explicit exception of Final Cut Pro et al and possibly iLife (to avoid cannibalising high-end and home-user sales respectively).

I’m probably wrong, but hey, I’ve nothing to lose. And it makes about as much sense as all the other options. Now, pass the popcorn – show’s on at 6pm BST.

Cnet have published a story, jumping on a recurring scuttlebutt bandwagon, to the effect that at WWDC tomorrow Steve Jobs will announce Apple is dumping PowerPC and moving the Mac to Intel processors. The Wall Street Journal concurs (paid subscription required, but quotes via Paul Thurrot), but Mac gossip circles are surprisingly quiet on the issue. In fact, they’re suspiciously quiet all round, with effectively no speculation about keynote announcements at all, for the first time I can remember.

So what’s my take? I think CNet and the WSJ are extremely respected news sources, and their tone of reporting implies they’re pretty darn certain about this story. So either Apple’s moving to Intel, or two A-list news sources are plain wrong in the most embarrassing manner. I’ll take option three – they’ve been scammed – or, most likely, option four – there’s truth to the story, but it’s not what they think.

I don’t buy Apple moving the Mac to x86. Sure, the G5 hasn’t hit 3GHz yet, but in case you hadn’t noticed, the Pentium hasn’t gone very far of late either. The G5 still at least gives it a good contest, and in some circumstances trounces it completely. Intel are in the middle of a messy 64-bit transition; heat dissipation is considerably greater than the G5; any such transition would require heaps of advance notice for developers, during which time Apple would sell essentially no Power Macs. No, it makes no sense. I have no doubt that Mac OS X could run on x86 – heck, I have little doubt that it is running on x86, somewhere in deepest Cupertino – and fat binaries have been a feature of Mac OS and OPENSTEP for a decade or more. So it’s all feasible, and in practice it likely wouldn’t be that painful for users, but unless there’s something I’m missing, it looks like commercial suicide between now and the time that the hardware were to become commonplace. Spectacular advances in emulation technology may be what I’m missing, but it doesn’t quite ring true.

So what’s the story? I can think of three options:

First: Intel is going to fabricate PowerPC processors for Apple.
IBM are up to their eyeballs in the custom triple-core PowerPC chip for XBox360, the PowerPC-based Cell processor for Playstation 3, and their own POWER6 server CPUs. It’s possible they just don’t have the capacity to manufacture the dual-core G5s Apple badly needs. This is a long shot, but it’s not completely crazy. As I recall, Apple is a full peer in the PowerPC consortium with IBM and Motorola. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have the rights to license the architecture.

I consider this fairly likely, actually. Wasn’t there talk about AMD making PowerPCs for Apple, a couple of years ago, when things were going south with Motorola and before the IBM G5 deal? If AMD, why not Intel? Business is business, and if Intel have spare fabrication capacity they’d be loony not to fill it, surely?

Second: Apple are buying CPUs from Intel, but either they’re not x86, they’re not for Macs as we know them, or both.
It wouldn’t surprise to see a new media centre product from Apple, combining a Mac Mini base-station and TV receiver with an iTunes Movie Store, and a slate-like remote control unit. And it would surprise me even less to see that slate unit run a variant of OS X, on Intel hardware. Remind me – doesn’t Intel basically run the ARM architecture these days? Um-hmm. And some of their laptop stuff is rather wonderfully low-power, too. And you’d expect such a slate to run something like Tiger’s Dashboard – no big deal if it can’t handle Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, surely?

Thirdly – and here I’m going way out on a limb – it’s not Apple who are going to make x86 Macs. It’s Intel.

Intel are not, of course, Microsoft, and there’s no reason they should like Windows any more than the rest of us do. Except that it sells them lots of hardware. Only… what if Longhorn were late again? Like, for example, it’s not going to ship until mid-2007. That’s another two years of Windows essentially not working, before Longhorn breaks lots of things anyway. If you were Intel, looking at likely sales over the next two to three years, would this look pretty?

Is it remotely possible that Intel have persuaded Jobs to license the Mac OS, and an x86 port at that? Apple could easily protect its core markets by not cross-compiling iLife or their Pro apps – they stand to lose relatively little in comparison to the potential gain of zillions of corporate desktops, at Intel’s risk.

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m off to read John Gruber’s take on all this. He’s usually right.

[UPDATE: linkage to Jason Kottke (Intel making PowerPC), more from John Gruber (ditto), Fraser Spears (basically doesn’t care, but thinks the PR is harder than the tech), Leander Kahney for Wired.com (Apple using x86 for Macs, because the hardware DRM allows them to do the iTunes Movie Store), Andy Ihnatko (something going on, but a specific type of Mac or something new, not ‘The Mac’ in general), Ars Technica (switch to x86 plausible), Doc Searles (Intel to make PPC). My favourite take, however, is Steven Frank’s.

Incidentally, nobody else seems to be loony enough to have suggested Intel licensing Mac OS X, rather than Apple themselves using x86. So if I’m right, I’ll be really smug. And I’d like to post for posterity the phrase: ‘Mac OS X86’, which is also inexplicably absent from view.]

[UPDATE 2: great round-up of links (except mine, tsk) from The Unofficial Apple Weblog. And, dammit, Jonathan Renztch coined ‘Mac OS X86‘ before I did.]

Anne Robinson, Trinny and Susannah, Davina McCall, and the Daleks – together at last!

OK, so last night’s Doctor Who wasn’t, perhaps, the best of the series… but it was worth catching for two reasons. Firstly, the Bad Wolf thing is now out in the open, with the Doctor noticing all the references through the series (there’s even a BBC site at badwolf.org.uk). Secondly, the trailer for next week’s episode, Bad Wolf, which appears to feature all the above-named.

Needless to say, I am not available for public engagements next Saturday evening. Oh, and while I’m on the Who thing: the series website has informatively amusing minute-by-minute accounts of the reactions of a test group of children. Personally, I’m most impressed by the commenter (aged 15) who notes that the Dalek, Slitheen, Reapers and the like cost a fortune, but the scariest creature to date has been… a kid in a gas mask.

BBC Radio. Worth the license fee on its own, frankly. Next week Radio 3 is having some sort of wall-to-wall Beethoven shindig, which I suppose is the sort of thing one expects them to do. But the sheer scale and audacity of the enterprise is surprising, even invigorating. Most astonishingly, they’ve somehow managed to negotiate their way through the morass that is the MU, and they’re going to make all the symphonies available for download as mp3. This is, I think, an astonishing experiment, and a magnificent gift by all concerned to – let’s not be prissy about this – the world.

The Scotsman delves deeper into the background to, and implications of, what they’re doing:

Yet it may turn out that Noseda’s Beethoven becomes the household version to computer-literate millions in China, India or Korea who have never heard of Karajan or Klemperer and could, in any event, never afford the price of a DG or EMI set.

To them, Noseda and the BBC Phil are the bringers of light and arbiters of art.

When, two or three decades hence, China is the world’s largest industrial power, it will be Noseda’s Beethoven that couples recall as their formative revelation, as our grandparents once savoured Toscanini’s.

Such is the potential magnitude of the BBC’s magnanimity.

As for our Melvyn – well, over on Radio 4 he’s been banging on about calculus again, bless him. His show In Our Time is available, I kid you not, as a genuine honest-to-goodness podcast, with a weekly-refreshing xml feed and everything. Fire up your favourite newsreader software, and listen to what you missed! Frustratingly, however, past editions are only available as streaming RealAudio, not downloadable mp3. Ah well, it’ll come.

Joy of delis! Beech-smoked tofu last night, from what I still think of as the new place up the road, even though it’s now been open for months. Stir-fried with beansprouts, noodles, cabbage and peppers, with a couple of little sardines crumbled over the top (I’d marinated them in honey, soy and chilli before frying them fiercely, so they were going to crumble whether I wanted them to or not).

Not, perhaps, something I’d serve to a guest, but I thought it was a riot.

When I win the lottery – a probability that, come to think of it, might increase a tad were I to actually buy a ticket – I shall most likely buy an Aston Martin. Barking mad, and the fuel consumption would make me wince every time I drove it anywhere, but there’s just something rather glorious about Astons.

I think it’s rather likely to be this. How barking? A dealership that’s accessed by thumbprint, that stores cars in a vault, and… nuts. Love it.

As I’ve already indicated, I’m a huge fan of this new Doctor Who series. It’s just disturbing enough to freak out about the right proportion of viewers, and the local kids here in Glasgow are walking to school in the morning playing Daleks. Which is cool. But I’ve been most impressed by the production sensibilities, in that they’re not trying to pull off too much. Visual effects are used only where necessary, and they even seem to be underplaying them a little – it’s mostly done by the power of suggestion, which is much cleverer and, indeed, more like the Doctor Who way of doing things. Just when one might have worried that the BBC had lost it with family entertainment on a Saturday night, they go and pull this on us. Bravo!

Anyway, one thing that’s completely passed me by is the whole ‘Bad Wolf’ thing. It turns out, every episode includes at least one reference, and even the supporting websites (there are several – unit.org.uk, whoisthedoctor.co.uk) mention it. Heck, mouse over the TARDIS on the BBC’s Doctor Who page. There’s an episode in a couple of weeks’ time that’s titled ‘Bad Wolf,’ so doubtless all will be revealed. The gossip appears to be assuming that the Master is involved somehow, but we shall see.

Excited, me? Heck, yeah. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have the Doctor back. Especially since I saw the finale of Enterprise over the weekend, and… well, I can’t tell you how happy I am to have the Doctor back. Ahem.