Apple And Intel?

Cats and Dogs, living together... It's Armageddon I tell you!

OK that was probably over the top. There's a lot of speculation that Apple and Intel are considering a partnership, driven mostly likely by difficulties with IBM as their supplier of processors and the higher cost associated with the PowerPC design. A few have also speculated that the real motivation is to kick IBM a bit to get themselves in gear. I can understand both sides of the house, but to a certain extent Apple is looking at becoming another PC maker or remaining a stand alone entity.

Since the early 600 series PowerPC's Apple as part of their alliance with IBM and Motorola manufactured their RISC based chips and began the 2nd generation of Macs (PowerMacs). With the difficulties of producing Portable G5's and the increasing heat/power requirements of the current 9xx series of PowerPC chips Apple is facing problems of supply and cost pressure. But what happens if Apple does choose to go with Intel? Where will throngs of loyal Mac users go?

Any transition will be fairly slow to adopt, most likely taking 2-3 years to fully wipe out their legacy PowerPCs. What Apple may gain in lower cost chips and perhaps better portable offerings may be offset however by an easier to penetrate design. Remember the days of the early Mac clones? The PowerPC design change was intended in part to eliminate Mac clones and it did a good job if it. As such this step-back as it were may be a double edge sword for the Cupertino company.

In the end it will really be up to Apple to decide which direction they take. Perhaps the answer will be a combination of alliances with Intel and IBM to ramp production. You never know.