20 years of Intel Macs: Why Apple changed, and why it changed again

“And today for the first time, I can confirm the rumor that every release of Mac OS X has been made for PowerPC and Intel,” he announced Work. This has been going on for the past five years.

Change

The “first” Intel Mac was the Developer Transition Kit (DTK) given to programmers after WWDC 2005. Basically it was a PC based on the Pentium 4 inside the Power Mac G5 case, and it was permanently available as a loan to builders who could pay $499 per year for a construction account and another $999 for equipment. Few, if any, of the DTK weapons survived; Apple required manufacturers to return the machine by the end of 2006 and offered to sell genuine Intel Mac products to seal the deal.

The WWDC keynote outlined the timeline, in addition to the tools Apple will use to help developers and users make the transition. The next version of Mac OS X, version 10.5 Leopard, will be compatible with PowerPC and Intel Macs. A parallel component called Rosetta can run most PowerPC applications in a patient-friendly manner while developers are working on Intel models, which can be distributed as binaries that support all CPU architectures. This change worked so well that Apple ran the same Intel-to-Apple-Silicon transition.

Apple will also take advantage because its computers use the same hardware as other PCs. From the beginning, Apple supported running Windows directly on Intel Macs through Boot Camp; the Mac OS X program can partition Mac disks and download Windows drivers for the Mac you’re using, and the Windows-side program helped boot into Mac OS (and finally offered some nice features like the ability to read HFS+ volumes).

By January 2006, Apple began shipping the first Intel Macs, starting with the new iMac and the redesigned MacBook Pro to replace the outgoing PowerBook. These early machines were indistinguishable from the PowerPC models they replaced, another way Apple used the first Apple Silicon Macs – a message that meant “these machines may be different on the inside, but they’re still the Macs you know and love.”

The white plastic MacBook of 2010. The first version of this design was Apple’s signature laptop in the early days of Intel.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

A new design for the Intel Mac era came later that year, when Apple introduced the MacBook to replace the old iBook. Like the iBook, this laptop was made mainly of white plastic (a black version, inexplicably a few hundred dollars more expensive, was also available at the end), and it used smaller processors with integrated Intel graphics instead of the MacBook Pro’s graphics chips. But it was a popular machine—I was a college student at the time, and it was the laptop you saw most of the time when you were out and about at school (or maybe the second one—usually, if you add any “something cheap from Dell” clearance).