CNET News.com: Macworld: Intel-based Macs built for speed CNET News.com: Macworld: Intel-based Macs built for speed

Apple has finally made the move - announcing its first Intel based Mac, in this case a dual core iMac laptop for just under $2,000. Jobs also announced that they had sold 14 million iPods last quarter, for a total of some 42 million sold to date.

This is truly the end of an era. Macs started on the Motorola 68000 (or maybe even 6800) microprocessor. But then, Apple pushed Moto to implement a RISC architecture. That turned out to be the PowerPC, in conjunction with IBM in what was called the AIM Alliance. I worked some on AIM when I was at Motorola. But then, when Jobs came back to Apple, he terminated all third party Mac licensing, and the biggest supplier outside of Apple for Macs was Motorola. The company ended up taking a major writeoff due to this, and rumor has it, there was a big shouting match between the then new Moto CEO Galvin, and Jobs over it. The relationship never apparently recovered, and as a result, Apple moved steadily towards IBM as its supplier for PowerPC processors. Moto meanwhile moved away from PowerPC microprocessors, and into embedded PowerPC chips.

And this is the final break with that tradition.