Rumors say Apple may switch the iPhone main processor to Intel’s upcoming Moorestown.

It’s too early to speculate until details come out, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear that Apple is considering this. And it would explain the closedness of the iPhone/iPod touch architecture… after all, once Apple allows third-party apps in, and publishes a toolchain/SDK, they’re pretty much locked into the current architecture, and switching to a new one is a major/slow/costly undertaking.

Consider the previous iPods as a counterexample. Apple has switched architectures there – we can’t even say for sure how often – without any users noticing. With only the UI visible on OS X, and no toolchain/SDK or even documentation of the innards, Apple is free to change things radically between software updates. By all accounts, the 1.0.x software is pretty much a work in progress, and 1.1.1 has probably changed a lot.

So, keeping things closed for now means the software hasn’t stabilized, and very probably the hardware hasn’t stabilized either.

Conclusions:

– the current generation of iPhone/iPod touch will remain closed forever, just like the first generations of iPods;

– an SDK is likely to come out only after everything (especially the hardware) has stabilized;

– Apple is unlikely to invest efforts into implementing TrustZone in the current generation, unless Moorestown (or whatever else they might adopt in the future) has a similar security feature – and maybe not even then;

– the fabled OS X tablet will come out when the new hardware is ready; by that time screens will be ready in the proper sizes; Sony showed an 11″ OLED TV recently, remember…