| Apple – Intel Transition |
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First two migrations were 8-bit 6502 in the Apple II series to the Motorola 68k architecture and the change of Mac platform from the 68k to PowerPC. This makes the Apple only company to successfully complete such transition, as every other company who has tried like Kaypro, SGI, Digital Equipment Corporation, Acorn Computers, Atari, Commodore have all failed. Steve Jobs explained that Apple’s main inspiration for the transition was their dissatisfaction with the progress of IBM’s PowerPC technology and their greater belief in Intel technologies. He especially mentioned the performance per watt projections in the road map provided by the Intel, which is must in laptop design, since it affects the hours of use per battery charge. The advantage of this transition was the potential of systems to run four types of software (Win32/x86 applications, UNIX applications, Java/.NET applications, Mac OS X binaries) at near native speeds. In the beginning, emulation software such as Microsoft Virtual PC or DOSBox was needed to run x86 software on the Mac. Now, such software enjoys much more success with high performance through visualization for example, VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac. Timeline Apple announced the first two computers in this series, iMac Core Duo and 15” MacBook Pro, both using Intel Core Duo chip on January 10, 2006.
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In 2005, Steve Jobs, Apple CEO made the announcement that the company would make a transition from the use of PowerPC microprocessors to processor manufactured and designed by Intel. So, Apple-Intel transition was the process of changing the CPU of Apple’s Mac Computers from PowerPC processors to Intel x86-based architecture processors. This transition was the Apple’s third migration of its computer line to a new CPU architecture.