Jobs announced, “And so today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS “This has been going on for the last five years. Just in case.”
Infection
The “first” Intel Mac was a Developer Transition Kit (DTK) made available to software developers after WWDC 2005. It was originally a Pentium 4-based PC inside a Power Mac G5 case, and was available as a loan to developers who could pay $499 per year for a developer account and $999 for the kit. Few, if any, of these DTK kits survived; Apple demanded developers to return the systems by the end of 2006 and offered to trade them in for a genuine retail Intel Mac to seal the deal.
The WWDC keynote also laid out a timeline, in addition to the tools Apple will use to help developers and users navigate the transition. The next version of Mac OS X, version 10.5 Leopard, will be compatible with both PowerPC and Intel Macs. A compatibility layer called Rosetta will make most PowerPC apps run tolerably well while developers work on Intel-native versions, which can be distributed as universal binaries that support both CPU architectures. This change worked so well that Apple essentially handled the Intel-to-Apple-silicon switch in exactly the same way.
Apple will also take advantage of the fact that its computers will use the same hardware as other PCs. From the beginning, Apple officially supported running Windows directly on Intel Macs via Boot Camp; a Mac OS
By January 2006, Apple began shipping the first Intel Macs, starting with a new iMac and a new MacBook Pro to replace the outgoing PowerBook series. These first systems were externally almost indistinguishable from the PowerPC models they replaced, another strategy that Apple had recycled for earlier Apple Silicon Macs – the implicit message was “Maybe these machines were different on the inside, but they’re still the same Macs you know and love.”
A 2010-era white plastic MacBook. The first generation version of this design was Apple’s signature consumer laptop during the early Intel era.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham
A 2010-era white plastic MacBook. The first generation version of this design was Apple’s signature consumer laptop during the early Intel era.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham
The first redesign of the Intel Mac era came later that year, when Apple launched the MacBook to replace the aging iBook. Like the iBook, this laptop was made mostly of white plastic (a black version, inexplicably several hundred dollars more expensive, was also eventually available), and it used a slower processor with Intel’s integrated graphics instead of the MacBook Pro’s dedicated graphics chips. But it was a popular machine – I was a college student at the time, and it was definitely the laptop you saw most often when you were out and about on campus (or maybe second most often, if you add up every single permutation of “something cheaper than Dell”).
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