Ordo Ab Chao: The circle is nearly complete.
For the last five years, Apple has been secretly developing x86 versions of Mac OSX and all of their applications in parallel to their regular commercial releases, "Just in case," as Steve Jobs puts it. In an astonishing, live demonstration, Jobs announced that he was giving his keynote presentation on a Pentium 4 system, complete with a money shot of "About this Mac" showing the Pentium 4.
I know. I nearly fell out of my chair.
Now, take a guess who was working with Apple on the Xcode development environment as it related to portability to x86?
After witnessing that little trick with OSX on the PC, I was in such a state of shock that I nearly missed the significance of a single sentence that was spoken a little later, not by Steve Jobs, but by Roz Ho, the manager of the Macintosh Business Unit at
Microsoft.
"Our team has been working closely with Apple engineers on Xcode so we can make the transition."Did you catch that, all of you iTwits out there? B Gates sent his minions deep into the nether realms of Apple's skunkworks (surly, there's a crypt somewhere inside 1 Infinite Loop) to assist with the development of Xcode, the key to Apple's transition to Intel's hardware.
This thing is going to be Longhorn with pretty widgets and iTunes.
posted by Kevin at 4:23 PM