Biography | Steve Jobs — He Told Developers in This Hall That the Mac Would Run on Intel

On 6 June 2005 Steve Jobs opened WWDC in San Francisco and told more than 3,800 developers that the Macintosh would leave IBM and Motorola chips behind.

Apple would ship Intel Macs within a year and finish the switch by the end of 2007.

The partnership with PowerPC had lasted about a decade.

Jobs said every release of Mac OS X for the previous five years had already been compiled for Intel in secret.

He showed Tiger running on an Intel machine.

Paul Otellini of Intel spoke.

Developers could buy a $999 Transition Kit: a Pentium 4 system and a preview of Tiger for x86.

Widgets, scripts and Java would keep working.

Cocoa apps would need days of work; Carbon apps, weeks.

The first Intel machines reached a stage seven months later, at Macworld on 10 January 2006: an iMac with a Core Duo chip, shipping immediately, and a 15.4-inch MacBook Pro at $1,999 and $2,499, shipping in February.

Otellini walked through fog that morning holding a wafer.

Moscone West at 800 Howard Street is the hall of the iPhone, the App Store, the iTunes Music Store, and Jobs's last WWDC.

It still stands.

A visitor will not find a plaque for the morning the Mac changed processors.

Cover: Moscone West dressed for WWDC in June 2011.

Photo: Anton Zelenov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.