This guy, BadAndy, seems to know a heck of a lot about the switch, and quotes some very interesting articles about it. Essentially, the way he paints the picture, Apple was getting painted into a corner by the IBM Freescale road-map, the evolving partnerships between IBM and Sony and Microsoft, and the fact that because of those partnerships Apple was seriously losing negotiation leverage with IBM when it came to CPU prices. On the other side, Intel is facing serious competition by AMD for pretty much the first time, and profits were falling to the point where Intel needed to pick up a PR win and some more business along with it. BA seems to think that Intel gave Apple a major price break on the Mini Core Duo, given the retail price of that unit, which would indicate a fair amount of willingness on Intel's part to play Steve Jobs' well-known game of demanding ridiculously low prices from CPU vendors on the strength of optimistic sales projections.
BA also quotes analysts, and includes his own opinions, saying that Apple's switch is the beginning of the end, and that their marketshare is doomed to slip even further now that they're beholden to Intel and not occupying a diversity niche in the hardware industry anymore. It sounds like the typical analyst FUD we've been hearing for decades now, which I think nearly always discounts the user loyalty and the added value that OS X and the Apple software gives to the Mac platform. Even if Vista is amazing, I'm betting that MS will still be months if not years behind Apple in sheer strength of design and ease of use. And while this clearly hasn't won the war for Apple, it also hasn't led to their imminent demise that's been predicted, oh, every year since they were founded.
Read the thread. It's a good one.
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