[dreilly1]

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html

Cutting to the conclusion:

This isn't a story about Intel gaining another three percent market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back control of the desktop from Microsoft.

Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I'm just guessing on this one).

This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was able to own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the back of Microsoft. And if they tuned the OS to take advantage of unique features that only Intel had, they would put AMD back in the box, too. Apple could return Intel to its traditional role of being where all the value was in the PC world. And Apple/Intel could easily extend this to the consumer electronics world. How much would it cost Intel to buy Apple? Not much. And if they paid in stock it would cost nothing at all since investors would drive shares through the roof on a huge swell of user enthusiasm.

I do think there's more to this deal than what is currently public, and I wouldn't be suprised to see some PowerPC technology that Apple owns make its way into Intel chips (maybe AltiVec, or some 64bit help?), which would piss off IBM to no end. Which is why all this talk about two architectures moving forward is bunk -- PPC is now second-rate for Macs now, no matter what the party line from Apple is. But I don't think Intel buying Apple makes sense at all. If nothing else, it would bruise Steve's ego too much for Apple to cease to be an independant company....

[Agasthya]

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=259475

and thats the locked one

[dreilly1]

Oh well. I guess I should have looked through more than one forum page before posting, then.

Carry on with your lives, then.



Edit: just noticed the announcement, too. Now I feel like a total idiot....