Will it happen?

According to this news report, on Monday at the WWDC conference in San Francisco, Apple's Steve Jobs is supposed to announce a phased transition to Intel instead of IBM's PowerPC processors. Why the change? Well, one thing I'm suspecting is a lot of money from Intel as a part of the deal.

But there are wider ramifications. With this change, there's even less that separates my Dell from the Apple. This makes me think of something I read in Apple Confidential 2.0: a letter from Bill Gates. In 1985, Bill sent a memo to the execs at Apple saying they had to open their technology to other manufacturers to make the Macintosh a standard operating system. He talked of the Mac OS being the big difference between Macs and PCs, not the hardware. And Bill said the way to go was selling their operating system. Maybe after selling tons of copies of Mac OS X Tiger at $130/box made them realize that if they could sell Tiger to Windows users they'd make a killing.

If I could buy Mac OS X and run it instead of Windows XP on my Dell, I'd do it. I always thought that it was fairly impossible because OS X was made to run on their proprietary PowerPC architecture, but if new Apples are gonna use Intel, then I can too. The question is when they'll decide this is a good idea instead of just making everybody buy their own hardware. They're probably the best way to kill Microsoft. Maybe next time you go to Dell.com you can get either Windows Longhorn or Mac OS X - which would you choose?