CREDIT: The Associated Press Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs (right) seals the deal with Intel Corp.’s Paul Otellini onstage in San Francisco yesterday.

In an announcement that has the potential to shake its user base to the core, Apple confirmed yesterday it’s going to switch its Macintosh computers to Intel Corp. chips for the first time.

It’s a major shift that some analysts say means Apple will be able to produce its computers more cheaply, while others say the move is risky and will cripple sales for the Cupertino, Calif.-based company over the next year as product lines begin the changeover.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed off a prototype computer using an Intel chip at an Apple developer conference in San Francisco yesterday, saying Intel chips will debut in Apple’s Macintosh computers by June 2006 and that all Macs will use Intel by the end of 2007.

The move is welcome news for Mac laptop users, who would like to get better performance on the go. Intel chips cost less, run faster and generate less heat than the products built by Motorola and IBM that Apple has relied upon for 21 years.

That means higher performance machines with a smaller footprint.

“The main motivation is more and better processor choices,” said Jean-Louis Gassee, who oversaw Apple’s products and research-and-development efforts from 1981 to 1990 and is now a venture capitalist in Palo Alto, Calif.

Clearly, Apple is even more closely targeting the laptop market, analysts say, because it’s a market that’s growing more than three times faster than desktop PCs. Shipments of Apple PCs surged 45 per cent in the U.S. in the first quarter, spurring the biggest market-share gain in five years, as the success of its iPod music players drove new Mac purchases, according to researcher Gartner Inc.

“More and more people are using laptops for everything,” said Richard Smith, professor of communication at Simon Fraser University. “They are becoming power users’ machines. This is all about building faster computers with better battery life. And Intel is ahead there.”

While the upside is large for Apple, there may be short-term pain as new users are attracted by the Intel brand and current Mac owners who are considering upgrading wait on the sidelines for the new, Intel-based Macs.

“It’s a bit of a gamble,” said Richard Rosenberg, professor emeritus at University of B.C.‘s computer science faculty. “Are people going to wait to see if the Intel Mac is a faster machine?”

Another potential revenue problem for Apple is its iconic iPod music player — which has carried the firm’s financial performance in the past several quarters.

There was extra iPod inventory for the first time in April, according to Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster.

For the past five years, the current Mac OS X operating system software has been built to work with Intel chips, Jobs said.

Apple is developing software called “Rosetta” that will allow PowerPC-based Mac programs to run on Intel-based Macs, Jobs said.

Rosetta will let users run the current Mac programs until software developers rewrite their products for the Intel chip.

It was unclear whether Windows-based software — or even Windows itself — would run on an Intel-Mac.

© The Vancouver Province 2005