Listen-- hear that? That's the fat lady singing, as one of the longest-running and most-revived crackpot Apple rumors in the history of the universe finally bites the dust: Mac OS X on Intel. The creepy thing, of course, is that this particular rumor has finally died once and for all because it came provably true; faithful viewer Shane Burgess was first to alert us to Steve Jobs's official declaration of "So Long Big Blue, Howdy-Do Chipzilla" as reflected in yesterday's press release. Flaming bunnymen notwithstanding, Apple has officially declared the PowerPC to be a dead end for the Mac platform and now trumpets Intel-- and apparently x86-- to be the future. The world's first Mac with Intel Inside® (probably a Mac mini) will ship in less than a year, with the entire product line making the leap by the end of 2007.

Several Wall Street analysts seem upbeat about the decision, although some, as BBC News reports, have said that the move "could confuse" customers-- gee, what tipped them off, the hastily-dug mass graves of the thousands of Mac fans whose heads exploded immediately following the announcement yesterday? But we've kicked it around for a while (and been extra-careful to avoid seeing the keynote stream in an attempt at rational, RDF-free thought), and no one's more surprised than we are to discover that we're oddly comfortable with the new direction.

See, here's the thing: while we still suspect that the PowerPC architecture holds more promise than anything Intel's got in the works, that doesn't mean it's going to be right for Macs on a platform-wide level. IBM is clearly far more focused on cranking out chips for high-end servers, the world's fastest supercomputers, and (somewhat incongruously) every major video game console coming on the market; if it cared a fig for personal computers, it would have held onto its own PC business instead of selling the whole thing to Lenovo last year. If IBM considered personal computer chips to be at all a priority, we'd have seen a 3 GHz G5 a year ago, and at least the slightest visible progress toward the advent of a G5 that could fit in a PowerBook without requiring that users carry a back-mounted battery pack and freon tank. How many times have Power Mac G5s been delayed because IBM couldn't cough up the chips? How many customers have held off buying a PowerBook because they're waiting for a G5 model that's probably no less vapor today than it was two years ago?

Intel, on the other hand, can produce-- not necessarily because it's any better than IBM at design or manufacturing, but because it makes an obscene number of Pentiums, etc. for every other major PC manufacturer on the planet. When Macs use the same chips as the ones used in the other 19 of every 20 PCs sold, you can bet Apple's never going to have to worry about when the next shipment's coming in-- or even when or how big the next clock speed increase will be, because all of its competitors will be in exactly the same boat. Like we said yesterday, it levels the playing field from a hardware perspective, and leaves the company free to compete on its strengths: user interface, user experience, hardware and software integration, and attention to detail.

Think of it this way: if Steve Jobs broke into your house in the middle of the night and replaced your PowerPC with a Pentium, swapped your installed Mac OS X with an Intel version, and replaced all of your apps with MacIntel binaries, would you even notice? The processor's so far removed from the Mac user experience that, unless raw performance is palpably different, the argument's almost moot. Some tests show the G5 to be faster than the fastest Pentiums, some show the opposite; our guess is that for most tasks and most users the difference isn't big enough to be noticeable. What we will notice is that Macs ship when they're supposed to and people who shop for computers based primarily on clock speed will have less reason to skip the Macs completely. (Oh, and since Macs and Wintels will use the same chips, Windows emulation could conceivably run as fast as Classic does in Mac OS X. Hellooooo, Enterprise sales-- and welcome back, Education! How ya been?)

We know, the transition will be a royal pain in the keister; developers will have to compile the equivalent of the old 68K/PPC "fat binaries" if apps are going to work on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs (good thing disk space is cheap), and if you think this won't make a lot of potential customers want to wait another year or two before buying another Mac, you need to switch to a higher grade of crack. (We ourselves were planning on getting a new top-of-the-line Power Mac before the year was out, but there's no way we're sinking any money into a dead-end system.) But most PPC binaries will run transparently (though slowly) in emulation, both Microsoft and Adobe have already pledged to ship Intel binaries of their apps, PowerBooks will finally stop looking so ridiculously underpowered compared to Wintel laptops, and most of us will eventually get over the fact that, time frame aside, Rob Enderle was actually right about something.

Okay, so it's a little icky to think of Macs using chips made by Intel, but heck, old-timers will remember how scary it was to find out that the chips in the first Power Macs were made by IBM. (Yes, IBM used to be the enemy.) Perhaps the scariest thing of all is that someone apparently got a brain transplant and a dose of horse tranquilizers, because some of the best commentary on the MacIntel shift comes courtesy of none other than Steve "I'm Not an Ape, But I Play One in MPEG Video Clips" Ballmer himself, who actually sums it up very nicely: "What changed?" Of course, he was trying to argue that Microsoft has no reason to worry about its market share in light of Apple's switch, which is just plain wrong (cheaper Macs, better availability, less customer resistance, etc.), but from a Mac user's standpoint, those two words are pretty accurate. Macs will still be Macs, regardless of what's crunching the ones and zeros inside.

Oh, the times in which we live: Microsoft dumping Intel for PowerPC; Apple dumping PowerPC for Intel; Rob Enderle being (mostly) right; Steve Ballmer accidentally being the Voice of Reason. With so much craziness in the world, how can we not embrace the MacIntel strategy? Yeah, we'll be fine with it. As long as Apple doesn't slap those godawful "Intel Inside" labels on its hardware.