ThinkSecret reports:

June 6, 2005 - Apple will begin shipping Macs with Intel microprocessors next year, and plans to complete a full switch away from PowerPC by the end of 2007, CEO Steve Jobs announced today at his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address in San Francisco.

The announcement had been widely reported over the weekend by CNET News.com and the Wall Street Journal, and this morning by the New York Times.

The move may come as a surprise for some users who remember Apple as the company that ran ads toasting Intel “bunnies.” But at this morning’s keynote, Jobs confirmed that Mac OS X has led a “secret double life” for the last five years where it has been developed simultaneously for PowerPC and Intel processors under a project called “Marklar.”

Details of the Marklar project — a code name Jobs confirmed publicly today — were first reported in August 2002 by Ziff Davis Internet’s Matthew Rothenberg and Think Secret’s Nick dePlume, described as “a feature-complete version of Mac OS X running atop the x86 architecture.” The story reported that “as [Apple] weighs the future of the Mac as a PowerPC platform, Marklar offers a relatively low-cost way of keeping the company’s options open.” Today in San Francisco, developers got the first sneak-peek of Marklar, which Jobs demonstrated on a Pentium 4 system, complete with iApps.

Other significant developments from today’s keynote address:

- Road to Intel: Xcode 2.1 is available today supporting both PowerPC and Intel development, and the creation of “universal binaries” that run on both processors. Apple is encouraging developers to create the latter.

- Dashboard Widgets, scripts and Java code will require no work to run on Intel-based Macs, while Cocoa apps developed with Xcode will require a few days of porting work and must be recompiled to run. Carbon apps developed with Xcode will require a few weeks of work; apps developed with Metroworks CodeWarrior will need to be moved over to Xcode.

- Jobs also demonstrated Rosetta, which translates binaries on-the-fly to transparently run PowerPC code on Intel processors without any porting work.

- Apple is offering a developer transition kit for $999 within the next two weeks. The kit will include Intel compilers and a Mac driven by a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor.

- Adobe and Microsoft both publicly committed to compiling its software for Macs using Intel processors.

- The next major upgrade to Mac OS X is code-named “Leopard” and will be released in late 2006 or early 2007. No other details were revealed. Apple is on track to deliver two million copies of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” to users by the end of this week.

- In contrast to last year’s WWDC, when Apple unveiled a line of new Apple Cinema Displays and offered a preview of Tiger, the company offered no other major hardware or software announcements, and instead concentrated on the strategic shift and its implications for developers.