More news from Apple's Quarterly Results

[ZoodTube]

I found this article at Reuters:

Apple Shows Off New Products, Warns on Economy

The article briefly describes some of the products/services introduces yesterday. However, there is a very interesting quote from Steve Jobs at the end of the article:

"Some analysts have also urged Apple to move to microchips from Intel Corp. INTC.O from those made by Motorola Inc. MOT.N and International Business Machines Corp. IBM.N to cut costs.

Asked about that possibility, Jobs said that first the company had to finish the transition to the OS X operating system, expected around the end of this year.

"Then we'll have options, and we like to have options," he said."

Has Apple ever publicly hinted at this possibilty before?

 

[jburne]

OS-X is a "new, improved" NeXTStep, the operating system for NeXT. In the end days of NeXT, the operating system was ported to darned near every platform in existence - HP, Sun, and INTEL.

The INTEL port was the most frustrating, primarily due to the near total lack of standards in the Intel Platform. It's too much work to make OS-X work with any randomly selected Intel box (Think about how long it took for Linux to work on various boxes) Way back when, almost no hardware manufacturer was interested in paying to have their platform "certified" for nextstep, so I doubt things have changed that much in that respect.

Personally the option I like most is an Apple-Sun merger. Easy to port to Sparc, and Apple would get a huge leg up on better server technology.

BTW, back when there was NeXTStep on 4 platforms, "porting" an application was a simple matter of recompiling "Fat".