Intel

Hey, did you know that if you Command-click (Apple-click) on an application in the Dock, it will reveal that app in the Finder? Now that’s spiffy. Not sure which Mac OS X revision that happened in — for all I know it’s been there since the Public Beta, but I just discovered it in Tiger by accident.

I cling to miscellanea because Big Change (TM) is afoot.

So 10.4 is the last Mac OS of an era, what in the future will be the pre-Intel years for Macintosh. Not too long from now, this period will be thought of much as we now think of the pre-PowerPC era.

I’ve been using Macs since, well, 1985, I guess, and Apple Computers since I was a pup programming in AppleBasic on my Apple II+. It was still the 70s, for crissakes! Anyhow, I’ve been at this thing for a while. What I do on a daily basis in 2005, all that I am able to accomplish every day on a computer, is incredible compared to what they were capable of 30 years ago. Partly, this is also a reflection of what I am capable of now, and I can truthfully say without any irony whatsoever that I have grown up with Apple and with their computers around.

The announcement of Macs moving to Intel is a bit of surreality for me, but despite my feeling recently that the idea wasn’t very plausible (mostly because it’s been rumored for so damn long), I am not very surprised. Shocked, yes, but not surprised.

How could I not be surprised? Simple, really — Apple does this a lot. I was surprised by the hints of what Mac OS X was to become when the first pre-Public Beta version of the OS showed up, and then more surprised by the eventual evolutionary leap from OS 9. I was surprised when Steve Jobs returned. I was surprised by the iPod, the original iMac.

Hell, I was surprised by the Macintosh back in 1985 when some college friend booted up "Ancient Art of War" and showed me what the Next Stage looked like.

But I’m not surprised by this move.

(I am surprised that John Dvorak finally got something right. Talk about your signs of the Apocalypse — yikes!)

It does feel weird as hell, though. Tom Bridge pegged the feeling today, comparing it to when the Cold War ended. I reminded him in an IM of when Bill Gates showed up on the video screen at a Steve Jobs keynote to announce Microsoft was investing in Apple. This doesn’t feel as dirty as that by any stretch of the imagination.

Even then, Apple was only doing what it needed to do to survive.

When the dot com bubble went splat and the tech industry nosedived, Jobs talked about how Apple was going to innovate its way out of the downturn. And while people can argue forever about just how innovative Apple is, what can’t be argued with is their survival record after all the declarations of their imminent demise.

What’s somewhat disheartening now is the death knells being sounded by a vocal minority of online Mac pundits.

Of course they (or naysayers like them) are the same folk who decried leaving behind OS 9, who claimed the iPod was a mistake, who thought the 68K to PPC leap would sink the company.

Like fools, small children, and ships named Enterprise, fortune smiles on Apple Computer. Which isn’t to say the company is always safe, happy, and going in the right direction. God knows they’ve made some stupid mistakes along the way. But they are still here over 30 years after a couple of knuckleheads re-invented computing, despite the best efforts of evil empires and former evil empires. Not to mention their own best efforts and good intentions (because we know what road those pave, right?).

Will this new move work out? Just like all of the other big moves, there is no way of telling. Since I am a betting man, I would be… surprised if there isn’t an Apple Computer still pissing off industry pundits in another 10 years.

Maybe even 30.