There seems to be a huge trend in Mac journalism. And that trend is apologising for saying that the Apple to Intel switch would never happen. Well I’m here to say that I called it. Well, sorta.

I said that an Apple switch to Intel makes sense. What I was wrong about was the architecture. But the thing is that we never knew quite how much Apple had been preparing for this. Sure, we’d heard rumours of there being x86 version of OSX running at Cupertino but we didn’t know how complete they were, or even which version of OSX they were. To hear that OSX has been running on x86 since the beginning in full versions was one of many things that have changed Mac users doom and gloom to acceptance.

Maybe the biggest realisation was when Steve Jobs told us the thing we had known for ages. IBM couldn’t mass produce a processor even if they had a magic mass production machine in front of them and all they had to do is press a button. Intel on the other hand can, whether this is due to a magic mass production machine or not I don’t know. The thing is it just sounds so much better when you hear it coming from Steve Jobs with his Reality Distortion Field turned on (and it was on Max during the keynote). So Apple wouldn’t ever have such big supply problems again with Macs due to processors.

And then came two things that no-one had thought about as being plausible. The first was emulation, which was discussed by many people and it was decided that it would be too slow to emulate at a usable speed. Well Jobs showed that Office actually runs pretty fast using Rosetta’s emulation (which considering the amount of bloat is quite an achievement). Photoshop is a different matter, as my lowly 500MHz iBook can open it faster, though by the time the Intel Macs are out Photoshop will be a Universal Binary, which is the second trick Apple had up it’s sleeve.

Universal Binaries are very interesting in that it’s one application that runs natively on both x86 and PPC OSX. I don’t think that anyone saw this coming. The majority of new apps for OSX have been written in Cocoa and most people just need to click a check box when compiling and their app works. Some will have to change a bit of code but not much according to Apple.

So there we have it, Apple switches to Intel. And they appear to have done a lot of work to make the transition is a smooth as possible. I said before that Apple is no stranger to transitions and they have successfully managed one architecture switch before, so I guess that most people seem to have underestimated them when it came to this one.

When we started hearing more and more sites reporting that Apple was switching to Intel Mac users called out as one saying “That’s not going to happen”. Well I guess Apple was doing something that we all weren’t and that’s Thinking Different.