“What makes a Mac a Mac isn’t the processor under the hood,” writes Walt Mossberg for the Wall Street Journal. “It’s Apple’s elegant operating system, [Mac] OS X, which won’t see major changes for 18 months, and the company’s stylish hardware designs, which it will continue to produce. When you peer at the screen of the first Intel-based Mac, it will look just like today’s PowerPC Macs, only it should run faster.” [Jun 09, 2005]

The net has been abuzz with gasps and shudders of disbelief since Steve Jobs announced the switch to… Intel… chips. “intel is the enemy… and now its going to be inside… gasp… us” When pigs fly, as the small winglets start erupting from the shoulders of the beta pig…

Ahh, it shows my lack of binary knowledge, to be so taken aback by brand name shifting. The success of vilification, of stereotyping… and of believing it all. Look at human history: we fought the Germans, with Soviet allies, and then had a cold war against the Soviets with the west Germans at our side, and now we ALL are against… a small band of radical religious Terrorists? Thats what we get for believing in our name calling…Showing my age, I seem to recall a similar Mac outrage when Apple first announced that IBM would make the Power PC chips instead of Motorola.

But, having read most of the savy pundits, they mostly agree: Apple had little choice but to replace IBM (poor supply, hot and slow chips) and it was a bold move in the best direction for the long run. And that the user’s experience will be little changed by what chip is inside… except that it probably will be faster, cooler and cheaper. Three out of three isn’t bad. And because the strength of the Mac experience has always been its interface, it becomes four of four.

Let each corporation do what it does best… Apple innovates with software and great industrial design, Intel is simply the best at engineering a chip. It could be a marriage made in heaven… It just isn’t the romantic simplicity that we are used to.