At 10:28 a.m., the next phase of Macintosh development officially began — toward Intel-based systems. Steve Jobs made his announcment this morning at Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Two more years of PowerPC and then we’ve got Intel-inside. Still don’t know if Intel’s going to be creating a unique chip for Apple or if Apple is going to use the x86 architecture. The later sounds most likely given Jobs’ unsurprising admission that Mac OS X development has been on both PowerPC and x86 for years.

Based on the press release from Apple and follow-up comments, Apple appears to be moving to the Pentium line. The $999 dev kit will include a 3.6 GHz P4

I’m kinda concerned about what’s going to happen next. I know it’s silly, but when I think of Intel-based computers, I think of beige boxes or clunky hardware designs. Hopefully, Apple will retain its design crown as we move forward.