So I finally got around to watching yesterday’s keynote from Apple’s WWDC. Steve Jobs was in his usual form, and showed off Mac OS 10.4.1 running on an Intel-based Mac (P4 3.6 GHz, to be specific).

Even though the “Steve Jobs reality distortion field” was in full effect, it did look like the transition to Intel from PowerPC will be fairly easy. The XCode base is key to the ease of transition, and seeing Mathematica (a very complex app) run on MacIntel after a very short port was simply cool. And Rosetta, the PPC just-in-time interpreter, looks like a good solution to the lack of native apps on launch day.

One thing this transition will bring is the true end of the “Classic” Mac OS. I highly doubt that there will be a TrueBlue (a.k.a. Classic) runtime environment in the Intel-based Mac OS, and that’s just fine. Classic is dead – for me, it’s been dead for years.

But now it looks like I’ll hold off on replacing the old G3 iBook until the Intel product is introduced. So home computing will be… relaxed, to say the least.