Why Apple didn't switch to Intel before 2006

Daniel Eran over at Roughly Drafted has a good little ditty outlining the history of Apple's chip architecture, and why they didn't make the move to Intel sooner. In a bit of irony, the two Steve's actually received quite a bit of good advice from a former Intel executive when they first started selling Apple's way back in the 70's.

There are some great points in the article, but my favorites are the words used to describe the x86 architecture, particularly in the early days. "Ugly," "stunted," and "legacy baggage" are pretty choice. Apple lovers everywhere know the joys of the PowerPC platform. Who could forget the classic Jon Rubinstein rap on the Megahertz Myth? Can someone please put that to music? The theme to Samurai Champloo should provide ample inspiration...

So why is Apple switching? Because NeXT made it possible. When NeXT couldn't sell hardware, they went solely to software. NeXTSTEP was cross-platform, and since OS X is a descendant of NeXTSTEP, well, the rest will soon be history. Read the article for full details, and stay tuned as they'll be adding some additional perspective on the move to the once sworn enemy of the Mac world.

[Via digg]