Apple + Intel = ...Intel?

[Archived in Apple, Entry, Intel]

[The Fire Ant Gazette - A Midland, Texas Blog Published Continuously Since '02] Apple's market cap is around $31B; if you assume a 20% premium for a takeover, that's still less than $40B. It's a hefty chunk of change, to be sure, but Intel's almost six times the size of Apple from a market cap perspective, has a very strong balance sheet and over $8B in cash (as of 12/31/2004). A cash plus stock deal like this happens practically every day in other industries.

Some slightly related from Technorati and Google.

[Notes] Greetings from planet Earth: It's not only about cost per cpu. Apple already sells their gear at a higher price point than the rest, so a difference of x amount of dollars, if they had a better technology with it, would not be a problem for them. One could argue that this was the reason to keep PowerPC for so long: better CPU, albeit more expensive.

[DrunkenBlog] WWDC 2005 Think-Along: Really, this is a contrived presentation meant to align your head with the idea that Apple going with the PowerPC was really just an abberation of the one true path towards the One True Path of Intel, but its importance can't really be understated and without it I think its helped changed a lot of people's mindsets overnight. Within a few weeks, Mac users will be bashing those regular cheap PC users who choose to use AMD for having inferior technology and aren't willing to pay for the real thing, and much of it will be because they watched the keynote.

[Brockerhoff.net] Solipsism Gradient: . Let's face it, most full-screen games usually push aside the underlying OS when they come in, have their own user interface, talk directly to the graphics card and deign to let the OS do something only for mundane stuff like saving scores files. So many developers didn't even bother to port to the Mac. When Virtual PC or a similar product comes out, gamers will have access to all Windows games at full speed; and it's almost certain that the Intel Macs will have some virtualization facility built in, but won't dual-boot. As long as Mac OS X will be whatever the new machines boot into, Apple will certainly allow other OSes to run under its control; that way, the user will always have the Mac OS X GUI visible somewhere. The effect of this on game developers is debatable. Some will be relieved not to have to do dual versions anymore. Mac-only developers will lose the Altivec advantage, so this may have some impact.

[Caballe.com] Weblog d'en Xavi Caballé: . Si no s'indica expressament el contrari, el material publicat en aquest weblog es distribueix d'acord amb la llicència Creative Commons. El contingut és responsabilitat única i exclusivament del seu autor i no té cap relació amb les seves activitats professionals.

[Tuaw.com] The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): Why, none other than Robert Cringely, longtime industry insider and former Apple employee. His latest I, Cringley column spins a rather convincing argument that Intel wants Apple more than Apple needs Intel, and Intel is willing to pay for it. Cringley sees a day when HP is selling Macs alongside those iPods and Intel either owns a large chunk, or all of, Apple.

[Gizmodo.com] Gizmodo: We here at the test labs got our hands on the Pocket Rocket 2GB USB key. Instead of running benchmarks on it, which we will do very soon, I assure you, we decided to put the pocket rocket into a series of uncomfortable situations and see how it fared.

[Macworld.com] Editors' Notes Weblog: Apple on Intel? - Macworld Forums: But Apple has always made bad decisions with OSX. They went with a micro-kernel, they haven't compiled with IBM's compiler just yet, the Macs we own today are snails compared to what they should be, all due to software choices. I wish I could be Apple CEO for a day, you would hear two big thuds as Mach and GCC go flying out the building, and OSX re-emerges with active participation and collaboration in BSD, Mach is replaced with a monolithic BSD kernel, and we do an in-depth study to see if IBM's compiler can generate more efficient code, and never look back if it can.

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Jargon, Desktop Computer News

Posted at June 11, 2005 10:31 AM