I Didn’t MIDdder A Thing About Intel iPhones

No, I’m not behind the “early reports” that future iPhones will use Intel’s MID platform. But, they’re partly correct… future iPhones will be rocking to the Intel tune.

Why? Well, why else did Apple not want people cooking third-party apps… because they’d be on a soon-to-be-obsoleted platform, that’s why.

Follow me for a second. Apple opens up the ARM (RISC, a la PowerPC) iPhone to developers. Then, they announce that future iPhones will use Intel chips. Oh, great, another PowerPC-to-Intel transition.

So, Apple is keeping the platform temporarily closed, until that transition can take place. The 1.1.1 update encrypted the file system just so hackers can’t mess around with the baseband (it would make the unofficial iPhone Dev Wiki’s job much easier). It also gives Apple enough time to put VT-X into iPhone and give a hypervisor for developers to safely run low-level, third-party software in an embedded environment (a la PlayStation 3).

So, enjoy, your future iPhone will use Intel Core Embed technology. Oops, oh well, there goes the name. And, like all things Apple, it won’t use the raw MID spec. In fact, it likely won’t use the MID platform itself, but rather use a lot of technologies that resemble/parallel Intel MID. Remember, iPhone, while being radically different from iPod, also employs a lot of similar parts. Apple’s going to pick and choose, and also push Intel into adding a few things they want.