[X4U] Apple's move to Intel chips

[Lars Bertelsen]

>Apple will always have proprietary chips.  It's 
>just an Intel chip working with specific Apple 
>chips.  You can't run X on PC.
>
>Paul Moortgat
>

Hm... I think you are trying to predict what 
Steve Jobs will do in the future...
You're a braver man than I! ;-)

I'd say that this depends on:
a) wheter Steve Jobs sees Apple as a hardware company or a software company
and
b) If he does see Apple as a hardware company, 
wheter he feels threatened by the cheaper PC 
hardware...
Consider the iMac G5. This is such a different 
design that it might easily have done well in the 
market, even if it were a PC running Windows.

One might argue that there will always be a small 
hardcore group of people willing to pay a premium 
price for a piece of hardware as long as  it is 
labeled "Apple" and is really cool in it's own 
right, simply because it is better designed than 
anything else out there.

Probably not a _large_ group of people, but then 
Apple's marketshare today isn't that big anyway...

I think the real show stopper may be wheter the 
Apple engineers are able to come up with a way to 
ensure that OS X on non-Apple hardware will run 
as (more or less) predictably and reliably as we 
have come to expect Mac OS to run.

As long as there is any chance of people 
installing Mac OS on a run-of-the-mill PC and 
getting the same kind of user experience you get 
from running Windows on the same machine (you 
know, the "NOW what is it doing?!?!?" kind that 
we'we all come to know and love;-) ), Apple are 
probably _not_ going to risk their brand by 
allowing it.

If they can overcome this problem, then I 
wouldn't be comfortable at all trying to guess 
what they'll do...

Lars Bertelsen

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