Yes, it’s true, Steve Jobs told the standing-room-only crowd in his keynote address. We are going to begin transitioning from PowerPCs to Intel processors.

Apple will ship some Intel-powered Macintosh machines by mid-2006 and complete the transition to Intel by mid-2007, said the chief executive of Apple Computer Inc.

Job’s decision to end Apple’s 11-year relationship with IBM, the maker of Macintosh’s PowerPC microprocessors, though widely speculated, was nothing short of stunning.

Despite the rumors, it’s still shocking, said conference attendee Brian Friedrich of Vancouver-based tech education firm Friedrich Education Services.

Friedrich said he expects the move to Intel will give Apple greater credibility among enterprise IT departments and enable a more solid processor road map. Yet he also wonders whether this means Apple OS X may be able to run, at some future point, on machines other than Macintoshes. It’s interesting, Freidrich said.

It’s horrible, said another attendee, Jonathan Piccolo, an Apple-certified technician from Florida. He said he expects the shift would make it easier for PC users to transition to Macs. However, he pointed out that Jobs didn’t mention speed or performance or what to expect.

Piccolo’s comments echoed several other attendees who had many questions about what the move will mean and comments about what Jobs did not say. Notable missing from Jobs’ keynote, for instance, was a detailed rationale for switching to Intel.

As we look ahead, we envision some amazing products for you, Jobs said. But we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap.

Jobs pointed to power consumption being just as important as performance. PowerPCs promise just 15 units of performance per watt versus 70 units per watt with a comparable chip from Intel, he said.

However, developer and conference attendee Joseph Grun said afterwards that Jobs’ comparison simply does not add up. Grun, who is the faculty member of a major US university, pointed to Apple’s own Web site that claims the Xserve G5 processor (IBMs’ G5 chip for servers) consumers at most 55 watts per processor, compared to Intel’s Opteron chip that consumes 89 watts or Intel’s Xeon at 110 watts.

Indeed, apple.com cites a number of examples of PowerPC chips outperforming, in several ways, various Intel chips.

[Jobs] told an out-and-out lie, Grun said. It was disappointing to hear that coming out of Steve’s mouth.

In addition to the PowerPC roadmap, Jobs also pointed to not being able to keep his promise, made at the conference two years’ earlier, that Apple would have a G5 3GHz PowerMac within a year (a Macintosh that fast does not exist today). And Apple still doesn’t have a G5 laptop, he said.

IBM declined comment beyond a prepared statement that did not directly address Apple’s decision. IBM is aggressively moving the Power Architecture beyond the PC, as shown by our recent successes with the next-generation gaming systems announced by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, read the statement.

Jobs spent most of the keynote addressing developers’ transition to Macs with Intel inside. He revealed that all versions of Mac OS X had been developed to run on both Intel and PowerPC chips. Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life the past five years, he said.

While developers need not rewrite all Mac applications in order for them to run on Macs with Intel chips, future machines will be equipped with the universal emulator Rosetta, Jobs said. Rosetta allows Mac software to run on Intel machines. Jobs demonstrated Rosetta on applications such as PhotoShop and Microsoft Office using an Intel-based Mac with seemingly no performance comprises.

Jobs also announced a new version of Apple’s programming environment Xcode that enables developers to write both PowerPC and Intel versions of their applications. We’re going to be supporting both of these architectures for a very long time, Jobs said.

The announcement means much extra work for some developers, including the team of Microsoft developers at the event.

Noone was more stunned than us, said a team member of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, who asked that his name not be published. Microsoft doesn’t used Xcode right now, he told ComputerWire.

General manager of the Microsoft unit Roz Ho, in her address to the audience, said Microsoft is working with Apple on Xcode and plans to create universal binaries for Windows.

But having two versions of an applications means software downloads will essentially be twice as large and, therefore, potentially slower, said attendee Kyle Killion, technical director of Bang & Olufsen based in Florida.

Still, Apple previously made two successful transitions: moving from Motorola’s chips to the PowerPC architecture in the 1990s; and switching to a Unix-based operating system about five years’ ago.

Intel Corp’s new CEO Paul Otellini was on hand at the event to tout the new partnership and poke fun at the two companies’ past differences. I bet there’s a whole bunch of you that never thought you’d see [Intel’s] logo on this stage, he quipped.

Adobe Systems Inc chief Bruce Chizen also came onstage to declare his company would be the first to release Mac/Intel-based software.

Jobs also announced that the next version of Apple’s OS X would be called Leopard and is slated for release by early 2007 (roughly when Longhorn will be released, he said).

The soul of the Macintosh is its OS and we’re not standing still, Jobs said.