I've always found this story a little odd. OSX is really just NeXTSTEP with an updated UI and application framework. NeXTSTEP was developed and ran on Intel CPUs throughout the 90s. Right through until OSX was initially released, even while at Apple Steve Job's personal machine was a Think Pad running NeXTSTEP. The other thing is that Darwin, the underlying OS of OSX, was released publicly as PowerPC and Intel binaries, as well as source, right through the PowerPC years. So people at Apple were at least running the base OS layer on Intel boxes for development and QA testing, out in the open, right through to the switch to Intel Mac hardware in 2006. They were even giving Intel Darwin to the public on installation discs. The only thing missing was the Cocoa UI layer. Surely Bertrand Serlet would have known all of this? His reaction of shock and surprise in this story doesn't make any sense.

I can understand that the plan to switch to Intel hardware was a big secret, but the fact the software ran on Intel the whole time was perfectly obvious. That such a huge deal was made out of Apple's amazing achievement porting OSX to Intel, then and even now, leaves me a bit nonplussed.