So, All of a Sudden, Pentium is Innovation?

Watching the vid last night of Steve Jobs’ keynote at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) and his rumored, but still shocking to hear, announcement that Apple was switching from IBM’s PowerPC technology to Intel processors, I immediately thought: “Wait a minute. Hasn’t Apple spent a bunch of time arguing that PowerPC-based chips provide the fastest desktop architecture on the planet? So, how is all this so earth-shattering? Isn’t Apple moving backwards?” TUAW asks the same question this morning. The comments to the blog item respond in the same way that I did to myself (hey, when it’s 3:30am and I’m up watching a devconf keynote, I’m allowed to talk to myself): Jobs was talking about future Intel-based processors, not the current product line. Allegedly, Apple and Intel engineers will work (I’m sure already are working) together to build new chips that Apple will hype to death like they did the existing PowerPC processors.

On a related note, our favorite(?) cyber-curmudgeon John C. Dvorak has an interesting piece in his Second Opinion column today about how, strangely enough, Linux might be the big loser in this bargain.