Writing as Santa Barbara's Foremost ACN Blogger (a title hard-fought for and created exclusively by Random Consulting LLC), it often falls to me to take up the reins as a creator of witty, mac-based bon mots. As WWDC '09 kicked off today, I'm therefore going to reference a common figure of speech, roll that in with a bad joke, and say that today Apple let the cat out of the bag about Intel-only support in Snow Leopard.

You get it? Snow Leopard? Cat out of the... oh, forget it.

It's been a while coming. Apple has been flirting with Intel support for as long time - back in the early nineties the somewhat smaller and more rabid Mac community had heard the drums of Cupertino and were muttering darkly about this ridiculous "Star Trek" project rumor - which turned out to be completely brilliant and also completely stupid at the same time.

The idea, if I recall, was that Novell wanted Apple to port System 7 to the PC, allowing Apple/Novell to go toe to toe with Windows in the marketplace, which we all thought was a fabulous idea at the time, but where it would have undoubtedly been utterly slaughtered and ground beneath Microsoft's bejewelled sandals. It was a bad idea, business-wise, but an extraordinary accomplishment; about a dozen engineers from Apple and Novell managed to port the Finder, Quicktime, and a bunch of other stuff from one platform to another in a few, scant weeks. Then they were all fired, or sent off to work on the Uzbekistani language pack for System 8.

Back when OS X was still NextStep with a fancy name, you could run it on a PC. I did. It was awful, and the other three or four people who had thought it was a neat idea must have agreed, because it never shipped in that form. Still, the idea that Apple should probably have an operating system that could run on the least-expensive commodity processor had powerful traction, and so from the inception of OS X, they kept the codebase in parity for both Intel and PowerPC.

Really, I don't think there's a lot to be too sad about. Sure, there are a lot of legacy machines out there that are running Leopard quite happily, but the day when a dual G5 was the bleeding edge of performance has long since waned - I run a mailserver on a first generation Intel Mac Mini that handily beats the living daylights out of my dual G5 tower in all kinds of performance tests. And there will most likely be robust support for PPC in Leopard for some time to come; Apple has traditionally been pretty good about that - I run into a lot of installs of 10.4.11 from way back in mid-2007 that are still being supported by the mothership.