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The Register has an excellent article on the reasons why Apple won’t soon be jumping over to Intel, as other rumour mills are arguing. Loss of influence with Intel, compared to with IBM, highest amongst them.

That Apple are loosing out in the “my PC is faster than your PC” stakes is clear: the lack of a G5 laptop, dual-core chips still a way off, power of the chips not increasing very fast (of course a different architecture makes a big difference, but it’s starting to look a bit embarrassing). However, as much as I’d love to be able to run up Apple OS X on an Intel box, it’d so heavily undercut Apple’s business model (think expensive, proprietary hardware) I’m reluctant to think they’d do it.

At least just yet anyway. With their share price riding high, with the iPod “Halo effect” starting to be a bit noticeable, and a solid range of products, it’ll be some time before Apple consider such a move. I think it’s only when the iPod has been outflanked and that killer blow “not fashionable” (as it surely will be eventually) has been struck, and market share continues to hover around in the 5% area, will Apple reconsider a move to Intel. But I’m not about to count chickens.

So this “rumour” that they may be about to jump ship is hot air, a carefully leaked warning shot across IBM’s bow, but one I wonder IBM will head too much: they must be riding high with their PowerPC chips being so prominent in game console systems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2005 at 9:32 am and is filed under Apple, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.