An Open Letter to Steve Jobs: Push Ahead with the Intel Move

James Duncan Davidson, one of the co-authors of Mac OS X Panther Hacks, posted an open letter to Steve Jobs on his blog today. The letter isn't the type of open letter that we are used to seeing; it isn't filled with complaints and requests for things being done differently. Instead, Davidson comes out praising Apple for being on the ball on the cross-development of OS X on both PPC and Intel chips over the years.

He anecdotally goes through a list of different developers who easily ported their code over to an Intel-based system in hours or days over the course of WWDC, rather than months. He then notes, "At this point, I think that the transition is going to be a non-issue. In fact, I think we're going to be ready for shipping Intel hardware as soon as you can have them ready. And of course, quite a bit of the credit for that goes to the Marklar team for making sure the system was ready for Intel and the Xcode team for giving us the tools to make our applications work. . . . In conclusion: Push onward. We'll be ready. Let's get on with it."

If the delay in the projected switchover to Intel-based Macs has nothing to do with contracts with IBM, inability to produce the hardware now, and other distribution related issues, but rather, simply a stalling tactic to give the developers time to transition, then perhaps if more voices like Davidson's come to the fore, Steve and Apple might decide to begin their innovation a little sooner than originally predicted.