Last night I read quite a bit about the Apple news that they’re replacing their PowerPC processors with Intel processors.
None of it seemed to address some of the obvious questions – namely, if the PPC chips (aka G3/G4/G5/etc.) were so smokin fast, why would a move to Intel be a good thing?
Once again, brain child Robert Cringley addresses these questions in his latest article. He also has an interesting theory on what’s really going on:
Microsoft comes into this because Intel hates Microsoft. It hasn’t always been that way, but in recent years Microsoft has abused its relationship with Intel and used AMD as a cudgel against Intel. Even worse, from Intel’s standpoint Microsoft doesn’t work hard enough to challenge its hardware. For Intel to keep growing, people have to replace their PCs more often and Microsoft’s bloatware strategy just isn’t making that happen, especially if they keep delaying Longhorn.
Enter Apple. 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).
Another must read from Cringley.
