Sounds like someone has an inferiority complex. Were Mac users smug about using the PowerPC? Are you smug about Intel? Is it that you envy the nice design? The pleasant user interface? The capable unix-based operating system? The free development tools? The features and long battery life of the Powerbooks? That all your friends have them and love them, but you dont?

There's been a lot of confusion about this, and I think a lot of people are getting things just plain wrong. My take on it, which may or may not be correct, but which I believe approximates the truth to the best of my ability, follows.

First, Apple is not competing with Microsoft any more or less than they were before the announcement. They are not becoming a PC OS company. That's what killed OS/2 and BeOS, and Apple is well aware of it. When you become a PC OS company, you suddenly have to support 2^n combinations of video cards, chipsets, memory buses, IO busses, and expansion cards. Nobody can do that except Microsoft, because they've been doing it for 25 years, or open source OS's like Linux, because they're powered by millions of insane hairy Australians and Finns.

I can't imagine that Apple is going to schlep down to Fry's, build a bunch of PCs, and put Apple logos on them. It seems much more likely that their hardware guys are still going to be very much in need, because they are almost certainly going to be building a complete platform around an Intel CPU (assumedly, the Pentium D to start with, or the Pentium M for laptops).

I'm not prepared to say for sure that they won't rebrand an Intel motherboard, but I think it's pretty unlikely. They were dicked around by Motorola and IBM so much that they've still got the taste in their mouth. They want to control as much of the hardware platform as possible, and that probably means starting out with a fresh design. No BIOS, their own chipset, their own layout, their own fabrication. They have the infrastructure in place, they have the engineers, and most importantly they have the ego and the brand name. Jobs will insist on a shiny, clean, innovative (or at least stylish and innovative-like) design, free from 1981 IBM PC and DOS 3.3 baggage.

So here's what I think we'll see: A non-commodity, Apple-designed platform with an Intel CPU. OS X will require the right firmware to run, it won't boot on white box hardware. It might continue to use OpenBoot, but I'm sure it won't just use a PC BIOS. It'll have PCI-X, and a lot of commodity components, of course. It'll have some off-the-shelf NVidia or ATI card. It'll definitely have some extra-cool-factor Apple engineering and design. It'll be shiny and/or lickable. It'll be slightly cheaper than the PowerMacs, but not much cheaper, at least at first.

Eventually, someone might hack up OS X so they can get it to boot on their home PC using exactly the right combination of motherboard and video card, but it won't hurt Apple one bit, because it just won't be worth the effort for most people.

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2005/06/quoted_3.html

It's embarrassing that everyone knew that first post was me. Rus totally busted me by whoising stuff he found in his logs or something. That was rad. :)