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Originally Posted by MrNivit1 This is a bit of a paradigm shift here; where it does not matter what hardware you run, you will still be able to run OS X on it. |
Well, NeXT Computer shut down it's hardware division on February 10, 1993 ("Black Tuesday") and continued to support NeXT hardware until 2001* (when Apple closed down
Apple Enterprise, the OPENSTEP area of Apple).
So I would think that Apple will continue to make Mac OS X for PowerPC system for many years to come.
Further, NEXTSTEP 3.3 and OPENSTEP 4.x ran on Motorola 68k processors (in NeXT hardware), Intel (x86) processors in PC Compatibles, SPARC (microSPARC II, SuperSPARC II and SuperSPARC) processors in Sun hardware, and HP's PA-RISC workstations.
As Mac OS X is based on the same foundations, it could (conceivably) run on as many platforms if Apple wanted. So they are in no way stuck with Intel any more than they were stuck with IBM or Freescale.
*
Note: Black Tuesday was before the release of NEXTSTEP 3.0 as I recall and OPENSTEP 4.2 (released by Apple in early 1997) still ran on NeXT hardware... some four years after the last NeXT system was made.