Apple Transition Team at Intel


Intel has formed an Apple Transition Team to oversee Cupertino's switch to the Intel processor, PC Pro reports.

Both engineering and sales personnel are involved with the team, and this move by Intel is in line with other teams formed to deal with major corporate clients.

Intel and Apple previously worked together on a major -secret - project in the early 1990s, code named Star Trek. Like the deal of 2005, the plan was to get the Mac OS - at the time System 7 - running on Intel chips. Then-CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, approved the project. A small team of Apple engineers accomplished the task in record time. Then, as possibly now, Intel was trying to shrug off Microsoft's software monopoly.

But the project, like so many at Apple at the time, was not followed through, and Apple turned to IBM and Motorola and joined the PowerPC project instead. Now things have come virtually full circle.

Rumors persist that Apple will launch Intel Macs in January, but this would be considerably earlier than Jobs' original promise - around May 2006.