Jon Stokes over at ArsTechnica has published an article about the future of Apple and how the switch to Intel relates to the iPod. The upshot of his article is that the future of Apple lies not with the Macintosh, but with the iPod. He claims that the current success of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store are simply part of a transition away from the personal computer and towards mobile devices, much like the transition from mainframes to personal computers that started largely due to the success of the Apple I and II. With this in mind, Stokes offers the theory that the switch from IBM to Intel had little to do with performance and a lot to do with volume, pricing, and the XScale. With Intel processors powering the entire Macintosh line and the volume discounts that Intel offers on chips, it would make sense to use as many Intel chips as possible in as many products as they can go into. And so Stokes predicts the rise of the XScale powered video iPod, a competitor for the Sony PSP.

The video iPod has been one of those persistent rumors, hanging around for years and rising out of the background at nearly every product cycle. Usually it’s dismissed as impractical: the screen is too small, no one wants to watch video the same way they listen to music, &c., and for the most part I’ve agreed with these objections. Until recently.

TiVo has shown the world that people like to watch tv on their own terms. None of this prime time crap for us, we want to watch the shows we like at the times we like, and we want to be able to watch them even when they air simultaneously on different channels. And isn’t that pretty much exactly what podcasting is? It is, or at least can be, a method for time-shifting radio broadcasts. And Apple’s recent embracing of podcasting with iTunes 4.9 has raising some interesting possibilities in my mind. Apple has basically brought the podcast to the mainstream. They’ve made it easy for anyone to find and listen to a podcast in the same way they made it easy for anyone to buy and listen to digital music. So what’s the next step?

In my opinion, the next step is video podcasts. Instead of using your iPod to fill your commute with glorified talk radio, I plan on using my video iPod to fill my commute with the latest episode of HBO’s Entourage, or BBC’s broadcast of last night’s rugby match that aired at 3am California time (and not even on any stations I can watch). It could finally be real on-demand television: what you want, when and where you want it.

The industry usually follows the pirates. With 56k modems and early broadband we saw the rise of mp3s, Napster, and the age of free music. That stuff is now passé; anyone with a cable modem can download music at a decent speed, and get it at high quality from legitimate sources. Now the pirates are all about video: with a BitTorrent client and a good source you can download the same movies you can see in the theater, old film classics with your favorite actor/actress from yesteryear, full seasons of your favorite television show, just about whatever you want. And as with the music industry, the future path of the video industry—whether they like it or not—is to just go along with it. There are already plans in the works for commercial digital video distribution networks, and I think Apple is intentionally positioning themselves to be a major outlet for these networks, just as they did with the iTunes Music Store.