Apple-Intel talks intended to pressure IBM

Apple should buy out IBM and take control of all of its own chip design and manufactoring.

Plus, Apple would then control chip production for the 360 XBox and PS3.

Let's see who's your Daddy now M$!

This thought crossed my mind when I read about the Intel talks, but I wrote it off as conspiracy foolishness. It does make perfect sense, and I think Apple has a right to be angry with IBM. I'm sure Steve was relating what he had been told by Big Blue when he blurted out that the G5 would hit 3GHz in a year after the first release (now nearing two years ago). Add to this all the attention and apparent breakthroughs that IBM has handed Sony and/or MS, and you can see why Apple is frustrated.

Will it have any effect? I doubt it.

Apple is just 4th now after MS, Sony and Nintendo and they don't like it a bit. With there full membership in the PPC consortium they can go to another chip producer (like intel or AMD) and let them produce G5's or even work on a future Intel G6. There are long standing rumors that AMD would produce PPC's for Apple so why not Intel?

To me, things are quite simple. M$ decides to deploy the best graphics chip available (= IBM PPC with altivec) on the market for it's new Xbox.

However, IBM has to supply this chip by mid 2005, in order for the new Xbox to hit the market prior to the new PlayStation.

Result: IBM has to deploy all its engineering power (previously working on chips for i.e. Apple) to modify the chipset for what M$ esteems the best use. This way, M$ is able to stop the advantage Apple had in the PC world, and is able to beat sony to market with a new game console.

So, maybe Apple should have bought the PPC chip business from IBM, but M$ has beaten them to in (again).

The mac is the best computer on the market, and I have used one since 1987. But it is, as Bill Gates puts it correctly, only a very small niche player in the PC-business.

I certainly hope that was joke.

As far as the story is concerned, this seems likely. Theoretically possible, and thus a valid potential threat. (They did something like this back in the Moto days) However, unless IBM is in much worse shape than I think it is, the idea is absurd.

For all the "IBM is bad" people, remember AMD, the holy grail company people keep holding up, went from 2 Ghz Opterons to 2.6 Ghz Opterons at the same time as IBM went from 2 Ghz G5 to 2.7 Ghz G5.

Yeah, they have dual cores now, which gives them an edge, but these are not the days of Pentiums going from 500 Mhz to 3 Ghz in a couple years. NO ONE has been massively increasing clock speed.

If this gets IBM to put some more fire under their efforts, great, but to try and switch the mac line to an x86 based architechture is just nutty.

With the touted Cell processor and it's extremely low power and heat issues compared to the PowerPC chip, I'd think that the Intel talks would be more to leverage themselves on getting their hands on this chip sooner opposed to pressuring IBM into some deal with getting faster PPC chips???

all news from ghostlike, unamed "knowlegeable sources"… Intel makes chips of ALL kinds, Apple makes computers and appliances and nearly every model has had an Intel chip in it somewhere. They are already business partners. It may have had something to do with percentages of production runs when the XBox goes into full production, who knows, but this speculative "People magazine, rumor spinning" coverage is just ridiculous. I'll wait for some real evidence. That said I have always maintianed (since buying NeXT) that they should have a "PC" limited version of OS X that runs on very specific hardware, like partneriing with Dell or something, so they don't have to deal with the "driver hell" of white box PCs. Well then, here's your new rumor, The new management at HP is pressuring Apple to release a version of OS X for thier machines so they can further distance themselves from their competition. Oh, you forgot about Apple's current PC partner who just reupped their iPod deal didn't you?

...the g5 powerbook is coming...

I was joking about Apple buying out IBM.

But this sucks being IBMs fourth favoriate behind M$, Sony and Ninindo now. Yet again, Apple's chip production gets put on the back burner.

You go bobolicious, I forget the acronym for falling out of my chair laughing but I am, perfect comment, I just reviewed all the "news" site that have stories on Google news page and all cite the WSJ source and nothing else AND all they focus is on the fact that Macs will "now be cheaper" to compete with "low cost PCs" as Apples are "historically" more expensive. That shows you how deeply this rubbish has been explored and by whom… moving on…