You have to dig back through my columns and blogs to catch these, but coming out of Steve Jobs' keynote, I need to lay down a little bragging, eat some crow, express a bit of sadness and pose my open questions. Is Xcode front-ending Intel compilers? Yes. Xcode 2.1 does that very thing, with a Microsoft-like platform target checkbox. Does Xcode produce ultra-fat binaries (x86/PowerPC/64-bit PowerPC)? Yes and no. You have to dig back through my columns and blogs to catch these, but coming out of Steve Jobs’ keynote, I need to lay down a little bragging, eat some crow, express a bit of sadness and pose my open questions. Is Xcode front-ending Intel compilers? Yes. Xcode 2.1 does that very thing, with a Microsoft-like platform target checkbox. Does Xcode produce ultra-fat binaries (x86/PowerPC/64-bit PowerPC)? Yes and no. There was no mention on stage about 64-bit anything. I’ll get that answer shortly.Did power consumption, my pet cause, figure into Apple’s decision? Yes, although I was more hopeful than realistic when I suggested that Apple and AMD should be buds. AMD’s got the thermal thing down for x86. No, I will not quit beating that horse. The first Intel-based Macs are going out to developers in two weeks at the dear(ish) price of $999, and that’s for developers that already pay for subscriptions to Apple Developer Connection. And you have to send that system back in a year. If you really, really wanted to get the first Intel Mac, you’d have to pony up something like $4,000 for the subscription and the hardware. As Steve said, “we don’t want a lot of these floating around.”I didn’t post the blog I devoted to the topic (I have sooo many unposted entries), so I’ll take a hit on Apple’s choice for bridging the x86/PowerPC gap. I’ve been tracking an open source project called PearPC that hosts PowerPC executables on x86 systems running Windows or Linux. Apple’s going after the same target with Rosetta [edit: Rosetta hosts PowerPC executables on OS X x86], with performance that’s not stellar, but is leagues more workable than Virtual PC running on a PowerPC Mac.What didn’t I hear? Virtualization and compatibility. Apple refers to OS X Tiger x86 as something that runs on “Intel-based Macs,” opening the question I posed in my previous entries about the degree to which Apple will hew to the commodity path. I assume that Intel-based Macs will run Windows or Linux, if just for the sake of doing it; Apple would get crucified for rolling out a locked-down x86 box. But what concerns me more is the question of whether OS X will run on commodity PCs, and for higher-end boxes, whether it will run as a hosted OS. Geeks don’t mind dual-booting their boxes, but the general public is incompetent to do it. Their failed attempts to do so would result in an avalanche of bad press about Apple’s software quality. So there’s a quandry. I wouldn’t call pushing OS X out to the masses a mine field, but Apple’s down to strategizing for people who insist on commodity hardware but would shoot themselves on the foot without a one-click install that’s paired with a one-click uninstall.Steve went to great pains to clarify that Apple’s PowerPC work is not finished. That’s another call I got right. PowerBooks with Freescale CPUs are the only notebooks worth carrying if you work on a computer for more than a couple of hours a day. I get four hours of battery life out of my 17-inch PowerBook. It doesn’t die, and that’s not just a matter of the PowerBook’s chassis design. Apple’s move to Intel for desktops–and that’s all Steve covered during the non-NDA portion of WWDC–makes sense for supply assurance, cost, and developer reach. But it would not make sense for notebooks. Centrino and mobile Pentium 4 are battery pigs. Freescale is where it’s at on battery life and on performance per cycle on portables. If Apple were to dump out of PowerPC on PowerBook before Intel came up with a genuinely thermal and battery-friendly architecture, Apple’s notebooks really would sink to the bottom with all of those clones shown at Computex.What else is news? I alluded to it in an earlier post that I couldn’t transform into anything resembling English (this is the best I can do leaning against a window at Moscone Center). Steve said nothing about servers. Not a peep. That’s odd, considering that the OS X Server ports to x86 have unquestionably walked hand-in-hand with Apple’s x86 client work. Steve touted a new release of OS X, named Leopard, to coincide with the Longhorn client. I’ll hazard a guess that keeping mum on servers is a combination of factors. Those customers who have bought into Xserve G5 made a conscious total platform choice. They opted for OS X on 64-bit PowerPC, and many of those customers are recent sells. Desktop users don’t care what’s inside their PCs, but server customers do. If Apple threw a 1U x86 server at its Xserve customers, those customers would feel as though they’d been told to go to (snerk) Dell. And one thiing is absolutely certain: (snerk) Dell and HP will always be able to make cheaper rack server gear than Apple can. I’ll pose once again the possibility that Apple will pick up Itanium for its server line. Intel, unlike IBM, can hit its roadmaps, assuming that AMD doesn’t interfere again.Good lord, I’ve got to take a breath. This entry’s so threadless because there’s just too much to try to squeeze into one post. I’m in analytical, strategic, architectural and prognostic overdrive. Is noon too early to knock back a couple of shots? ——– Technology Industry