“It didn’t feel to me like a long march,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, describing a moment several months ago when he realized he would end his relationship with I.B.M. He said the decision seemed obvious to his small team of top managers. “There was a day when we looked at each other and said, ‘this is the right thing to do.’ ”
The New York Times (and every other paper in the free world) reports that Apple will switch to Intel chips for their next generation computers. Judging from the slight downward shift in stock prices, Wall Street didn’t think much of the idea. Not to worry, Intel’s bottom line won’t register a big jump. Apple accounts for less than 5% of the market and they are not going be buying all of their chips from Intel, just the important ones.
However … people who like to discuss such things have confirmed my suspicion that, any Apple Operating System tweaked to run on an off-the-shelf Intel processor will be easily re-tweaked to run on an Intel-based PC. Hence forth William (the apple reference) Tel (one L for Intel). A William Tel computer will not rival the WinTel computers (Windows Intel) that we have today, it will blow them away. Or not … for now, let’s just worry about selling Macs during the transition. The hardcore buyers are going to be skeptical about investing in hardware that has been declared dead. 