In a little-noticed development at Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference, the company’s CEO disclosed a hardware change.

The announcement by Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs regarding the change from the PowerPC processors provided by IBM ones provided by Intel, seems to have promoted some mild reactions from the Mac community.

Changing over to the new platform will begin in 2006, with the company’s lower-end products. By 2007, the entire Mac line will be sporting Intel processors inside. It isn’t currently known if newly anointed Intel CEO Paul Otellini has convinced Mr. Jobs to place “Intel Inside” stickers on those new Macs.

During Mr. Jobs keynote address, developers in attendance got to see an Intel-based Mac in action. The machine, running Mac OS X Tiger, appeared to function just like a PowerPC Mac.

Software makers Microsoft and Adobe, who have some recognition in the Mac community for their productivity suite and image manipulation products, endorsed the change.

“We plan to create future versions of Microsoft Office for the Mac that support both PowerPC and Intel processors,” said Roz Ho, general manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit.

“We think this is a really smart move on Apple’s part and plan to create future versions of our Creative Suite for Macintosh that support both PowerPC and Intel processors,” said Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe.

Support for Apple’s Rosetta software from virtualization company Transitive Technologies will let old PowerPC applications run on the new Intel-based hardware.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.