Apple and Intel: the canary pecks back

A flood of emails and articles on the World Wide Web has prompted the Intel engineer that said Apple and Intel are cuddling up to respond to critiques. The engineer, who tipped us off about the story on Sunday, said: "I am a regular reader of Macnn and AppleInsider "The funny thing about the article and the message boards at macnn is that everybody thinks this is completely unreasonable because they wish it to be. "I for one, am happy that Apple is back on its feet, but if it wants to stay competitive over the next 5-10 years, it's going to have to at least tip its hat to iA32/iA64 at some point... Whether PowerPC is better or not (and I think it is), flukes of history have made Intel's chips the dominant ones. (Could it be because IBM kept Intel afloat for most of the mid to late 80s buy buying massive amounts of Intel stock? Ever heard of the 125% solution?) "Be it PPC/Celeron dual-CPU machines or full blown iA64 MacOS X Server, Apple is likely to do the Pentium dance at some point in the near future. Another possibility is to make MacOS X clients PowerPC only in the short term... "All these folks seem to forget that Apple did develop a full blown x86 System 7.1 in the 1994 timeframe, a project that was dubbed 'Star Trek', and Apple was rumored to have been supplied 486 systems courtesy of Intel. "Hell, it's even well known that Steve Jobs and Andy Grove are at least cordial with each other if not friends, as Andy has been quoted more than once that his inspiration for the Intel Architecture Labs (who have produced, among other things, PCI, which is used in both Macs and PCs) came from a visit to Next Computer, courtesy of one Steve Jobs in the early 90's. "A zealot mind is an Orwellian mind, I always say." Zealots and Orwellians (as well as the many sensible people who emailed us) are welcome to post their thoughts on our Message Forum.® See Also Intel works with Apple as PowerPC out on limb Apple to move on Merced