and the Stock is up on the news .. ;o) .. News.com .. or ... reuters.com

I'm sure those of you that travel in this circle saw this coming due to blogs or mental extrapolation after the CPU change

I like to poke fun at MAC users .. because they take it so well, I think .. but if the truth be told I have nothing against Macintosh .. I considered buying one back in '86 or so, and the reason I didn't was largely due to Apple's arrogance at the time .. and now the reason would be software availability .. the company seems alot more mentally stable to me these days ... Steve Jobs is somebody I wouldn't mind calling .. er, .. if I needed to borrow money

Steve "the woz" Wozniak .. isn't happy

it was kind of inevitable really ever since those geeks got a Vista beta disc to dual boot on an iMac with Tiger. Choice for the consumer is always a good thing and I think many mac users will welcome this as much as PC users wanting a cool box to run their software on - especially if it's a purposeful aluminium box packing in quad core processors and 16GB of RAM or the new sleek and shiny MacBook Pro notebooks :-)

will be interesting to see if the OSX Leopard operating system will be sold off the shelf for non Apple owners to install on their boxes.....

I have a Mac. *pets computer*

........and i have no idea what you people are talking about.

phil: Allowing people to run Windows on a mac makes sense from a business perspective because Apple makes its money selling hardware. Once the machine is sold it doesn't really matter what you do with it, they made their profit.

Selling the OS separately would be a really be idea because it would rob Apple of what would otherwsie be a software+hardware sale. They know that people want to use OSX and they use that to sell the hardware.

true enough to a certain extent but it could also work in that it could entice people into a hardware purchase after they have tried out the OS on their existing box. it would be one of those Apple leaps that works really well for them (like iPods) or really badly (like Apple Clones).

The question would be, would the legendary Apple 'Halo Effect' sales policy be powerful enough to support that....

Another issue is that you'd need drivers for every single conceivable piece of hardware that joe PC has on his Dell. Otherwise OSX would "suck" from his perspective. It would more than likely actually give Apple an undeserved bad reputation.

thats true too although Tiger can cope with many pc components and cards that arent even supposed to be Mac compatible - i have several Belkin pc cards in my G5 that work fine with no drivers at all. what may be a problem is the other way round - Windows recognising bespoke Apple kit such as the iSight cam built into the new iMacs and notebooks - as far as I know there isnt any support for Windows users wanting to use the stand alone iSight cam so it's reasonable to assume the same would apply to the built in model.

Also - Apple are commited to the Blu-Ray route of next gen DVD whilst Windows have put their flag in the hi-def DVD camp and have said they wont include support for Blu-Ray.

The whole reason I bought a Mac is to avoid using Windows! Keep it away from me!! *forms crucifix with fingers*

so .. if I may ask .. why didn't the RISC chip\power-mac pan out .. everybody quoted the "sheer processing power" of their gee-whizzes (sp?) .. but, yet, mhz numbers were lower than INTEL chips .. so I figured the RISC (reduced instruction set chip) aspect was what they were really reffering to ... and I mean 'before' dual CPUs

Most computer companies would tell you that banding around MHz figures is a pretty redundant and pointless benchmark to judge a computer on but in some respects this may be part of the reason Apple and IBM parted ways.

I’m sure there are many reasons for the switch over, undoubtedly a lot will be to do with simple economics and commercial politics. Perhaps a more notable but less publicised reason would be Apple’s increasing annoyance at IBM for their continued failure to deliver on PowerPC chip development. IBM had promised to deliver a 3GHz minimum processor for the G5 machines within 6 months of the launch announcement, years later they still hadn’t managed it. Similarly they had failed to develop a G5 chip compact and cool enough to be used in a notebook format – the smallest form factor achieved being the iMac which was, by design, basically a giant heat sink. Apple, in conjunction with IBM had ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into the construction and operation of a purpose-built installation just for the development and production of the G5 chip. Perhaps the straw that broke the camels back for Apple was IBM utilising all these resources to adapt the G5 chip into the new cell processor system for use in the Sony Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 at the expense of any significant development on the Apple chipset.

Many industry insiders had anticipated the split with IBM although most had envisaged a venture with AMD as opposed to Intel.

BTW - been reading up on BootCamp on the Apple site today and for a Beta release, it looks very good indeed - although as expected, custom mac hardware such as the iSight isnt supported - will be interesting to see how it is incorporated in Leopard when that is previewed in August.

possibly the best comment I've seen about BootCamp so far:

"You get the stability of Windows with the value-of-money of Apple hardware. Sign me up."

and who said sarcasm and irony were dead :-)