Ok, so everyone cares, however most are making to big of a deal about it. In reality, consumers don’t have anything to worry about.

Apple will be switching to Intel processors in about a year and it is a big change. Big for Apple. However they are commented to it and have already created a program to allow developers to easily port their applications over. The biggest changes will happen with Apple and the developers, not the general public.

So what do we have to worry about? Nothing really. The PowerPC processors that are in all Macs today will continue to be supported for years to come. What we are coming to is a transitional phase where PowerPC Macs and Intel Macs will live happily together. Programs will run on both and the PowerPC will be probably supported until 2010 or even later.

It’s like when we went from OS9 to OSX. Support for OS9 didn’t really die off until about two years after OSX was released. Heck some still run OS9 today. Still, software is a different deal than hardware. Since software took about 2 years, hardware will need to take at least twice as long. My bet is five years or more. That means that an Mac out there today, or bought in the next year, would be fully supported until 2011.

Ok, so it’s all speculation. However Apple knows that this is a big switch and they need to make it as easy on the customers as possible. We won’t know for sure until Apple gives more details, however I don’t think that there is anything to worry about.