Apple Goes Intel...

Than an average whitebox PC, quite probably. But if you choose components for your whitebox PC carefully, I think you can get stuff significantly better than what Apple makes, for less money. I care about being able to buy reasonably inexpensive hardware to run non-proprietary operating systems (e.g., BSD or Linux). To the extent that Apple makes good hardware that can run those, I'm interested. If building x86-based hardware lets Apple produce lower-priced machines, I think that's a good thing. And I don't think the average user of a Macintosh really cares about what processor is inside it. If the software does what it's supposed to, that's what counts. Beyond that, it's all marketing. The "Intel Inside" campaign was evidently fairly successful in the PC market; it's unclear whether Apple will be willing to put "Intel Inside" stickers on their machines, but if they do it might actually result in a small increase to their sales. However, if Apple starts putting DRM in their hardware (e.g., Intel's LaGrande technology), such that it can't run unapproved operating systems, it will be useless as far as I'm concerned. DRM'd PC hardware that will only boot an operating system with a verified digital signature of an "approved" software company is Microsoft's wet dream; they want to eliminate both piracy of their OS and applications, and the use of free software alternatives. In that regard, Apple's motivations are aligned with Microsoft's, since they want to prevent piracy of OS X. So far Microsoft has claimed that the DRM features they're building into their software and pushing for inclusion into future hardware will not prevent running alternative operating systems, and will only be used to allow access to DRM'd content. That's bad enough, but I can reluctantly live with it, since I don't need that content [*]. But I think it's incredibly naive to expect that they will stop there, or that Apple won't jump on that bandwagon. If this happens, future computers will come in two classes: 1) Inexpensive, commodity hardware that can only run proprietary software 2) Expensive specialty hardware that can run free software, but cannot run the proprietary software. Extrapolating the trend further, we can expect to see software vendors push for restrictions and licensing on software development tools, debuggers, etc. See Richard Stallman's essay "The Right to Read". When I first read that essay, I thought he was overreacting, but the trends of the last few years (e.g., the DMCA, other countries enacting similar laws, the EU trying to adopt software patents despite the member states' parliaments voting against them, and the media companies pushing for even stronger laws) have convinced me that he is absolutely right to be worried. Eric [*] Up until it becomes impossible to get content that is non-DRM'd. What happens when you can't get the news, or your IRS 1040 form, without DRM? For those that don't think it will happen, consider that many government agencies worldwide routinely require the use of proprietary data formats (e.g., Microsoft Word, Excel) for interaction with the public. Microsoft claims that forthcoming versions of Office will use open data formats, but I'm skeptical. They're going to do that to the absolute minimum extent needed to avoid the $5M/day EU fine, but they'll still do whatever it takes to get customer lock-in.