A zillion words have been written on this, but a few more won’t hurt. First off, I’m amused by the few brave souls writing about the pricing, whether or not Apple will spend less per Intel chip than they were with IBM. You can safely ignore them, because it’s like this: there are a few Really Big Secrets that very few people and no journalists know: one of them is how much box-builders like Apple, HP, Dell, and Sun pay chip-builders like Intel, IBM, and AMD. I bet that when whoever at Apple sat down across the table from whoever at Intel the negotiation was complicated and involved lots more than the per-chip cost. You know what I, personally and selfishly, hope Steve asked for? First cut at those Intel “Yonah” chips that everyone thinks are going to be just the greatest thing, so I can get a faster laptop than anyone. Second point: I bet that some Apple VIP has, as of today, got regularly scheduled meetings with an AMD VIP, because the x86 companies are now competing for Apple’s business on a pretty level playing field. Finally, I can’t leave this territory without a pointer to Paul Murphy, who as usual is pointing in a different direction from everyone else, but who (also as usual) is worth reading.
