Apple Move Sweet as Pie

The news of Apple switching to Intel processors was somewhat anticlimactic for me. Surely, the rumor mill — which included a short article in a little newspaper called The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) — presaged the event by a number of days and softened the blow, but like others, I’ve long believed that somewhere in Cupertino (or Palo Alto), a PC was running Mac OS X.

Hearing the news was still awe-inspiring, but as consumer electronics guru Walter Mossberg said, as long as the Mac experience remains intact on future “Mactel” machines, consumers, including me, won’t bat an eye. If Apple can provide developers with tools to ease the transition, something far easier than the migration from 68K to PowerPC or the long metamorphosis from “Classic” MacOS 9 to Mac OS X, the move to Intel chips will be no more painful than filling up with Kangaroo gas instead of BP. Belly up to the Genius Bar: Now Serving… dual-core, 64-bit PowerBooks.

If anything about the announcement causes my head to spin, it’s the vault of opportunities that Mactel could crack open. For starters, how about the untold millions of PCs running a lackluster and vulnerable Windows? Crazy? I don’t think so. According to a recent report by AssetMetrix, 48 percent of all business PCs are still running Windows 2000. By 2006, a mature and secure Mac OS X may be much more appealing than a “1.0” Longhorn. Access to such…

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