Apple's sloppy wet kiss for Intel
- IT TOPICS:Hardware
Assuming it's not all a big hoax and Steve Jobs really will announce later today that he's shifting to Intel for chips, I can't help but wonder what the reaction of the Mac faithful will be. I have a hunch that a lot of people in the crowd at the Worldwide Developer's Conference in San Francisco will get the same feeling in the pit of their stomachs that they got back in 1997 when Jobs announced that Microsoft was investing $150 million in Apple. At least back then they could take comfort in thinking of the "investment" as more of a de facto copyright infringement settlement.
A lot of them have worn their independence from Intel as a badge of honor that's been pinned right next to the one honoring their independence from Microsoft. Apple's shift away from IBM and Freescale makes sense on a lot of levels, but it should have shifted to AMD instead of Intel. Having a better Intel/AMD balance of power could only be a good thing in a market that has suffered long enough at the hands of overwhelmingly dominant suppliers.
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