But Apple could be Microsoft -- at least in the domestic market. Despite Microsoft's effective monopoly, Redmond has conspicuously failed to lock in the home. Everyone runs Windows because that's what comes on their cheap hardware, but all of the attempts to force ordinary users into an MSN-centric, Passport controlled, Active X mediated world have failed. In fact, consumer exposure has contaminated the Microsoft brand: viruses, trojans and spyware are seen as uniquely Windows experiences.
For all that, though, Apple has to compete on price. It can't do that on hardware: the economies of scale are tipped far too heavily against it for any amount of engineering brilliance to help. But it can most certainly do that on software. It has a superior product, superior image and superior consumer nous. A switch to Intel architecture creates a level playing field where those superiorities can be directly employed and Apple's suite of great consumer software - iLife, Garage Band, and the rest -- gets millions more potential customers.
It is possible of course to have Intel-based products that are not PC compatible. Apple could manage the transition almost invisibly, taking higher hardware margins while maintaining its separateness. It is far more exciting to envisage a world where when you buy a £500 Dell online, you get to tick a box that says "Apple OS, please". As for Longhorn: demonstrations of the pre-beta product have been as thrilling as a tour of a Basingstoke call centre. If it is hatched into a consumer environment where Apple is already rampant, it will be gobbled up like an ugly ducking in a lake of alligators.
"Roll up this map of Europe", said William Pitt as Napoleon rampaged across the continent. "It will not be needed these ten years hence". It is too soon to say whether the marketing cartographers behind Microsoft's Longhorn roadmap will feel that way about Apple, but history is certainly being made.
Talkback
Interesting speculations, but I can't help wondering something: why does everybody assume that Apple wants to dominate the market? They've had plenty of opportunities to 'sell out' - go for the numbers, so to speak, but they haven't.
Case in point; ipod/itunes. despite the number of competing music stores, they knowingly go it alone, despite the fact that this approach leaves a dual market - them, and everybody using WMP.
True, their market share is low, but have you looked at their revenue? Their profit margins? This article mentions DELL, the only 'Intel' PC vendor that still looks viable - again I say check out their margins.
Apple's choice is simple; do what they are doing, making lots of money on fewer sales, or do what everyone else is doing; make low margin consumable garbage by the bucketload.
Also, Apple's 'all-in-one' hardware/software approach has been the reason for much of their success - including the agility of the OS. A generic 'one size fits all' OS would push OSX towards being bloat-ware; a market Redmond has well and truly cornered.
BMW could, at any time, have made cheap, tinny runabouts that cost little, make little return, and fill the streets (they had ample opportunity with Rover). They didn't, and why would they? They're doing fine, just as they are.
I agree with the previous poster...Just because the Mac has an Intel cpu doesn't mean OSX et-all will run on a standard Dell. It does probably mean they will be able to pull the iTunes cross-platform move much more easily and when they want.
What nobody seems to get is that this is all about mobile devices. The Apple roadmap clearly envisages all sorts of non-PC devices running flavors of Darwin and/or OS X. For example, an iPod which runs OS X remains unfeasibile unless you start to think in terms of low power-consumption intel chips. This, and streaming wimax video in the home, and just possibly a handheld tablet pc device that will converge the iPod and blackberry, are where Apple is headed.