As regards the move to Intel, I think Steve Jobs simply concluded that he was now in a position to take a much larger share of the PC market and he could only do that with Intel hardware. With the move to Intel the “it ain’t compatible” problem melts away.

I read some article on the web this morning suggesting that Apple will eventually drop OS X in favour of Windows. It’s rare that I get to read anything that is so dead wrong. There’s not a chance in any of the circles of hell that Apple will drop OS X. The article also suggests that Apple is NOT attracting Windows users to OS X. Facts suggest otherwise. Apple converted a million or so Windows users last year, including me. Almost everyone I know in the professional space is considering Apple for their next PC. (Some won’t move, some will, but the point is that Apple has become credible. It didn’t use to be.)

And let’s not forget that 2006 is the year of the Leopard. Steve Jobs fully intends to launch Leopard, the next version of OS X, at about the same time that Microsoft brings Vista to market. As of this week Vista became a known phenomenon. The version Microsoft just released is “feature complete”. Leopard is a completely unknown phenomenon. Steve Jobs would not be organizing a head-to-head OS release if he didn’t have something up his sleeve.

What I’m guessing we’ll see in Leopard (and I am guessing) is this: Leopard will let you run Windows-in-a-box in the same way that under Windows you can run DOS-in-a-box. It will be sold for Apple Intel machines in a form that is “Windows enabled”. You will be able to install Windows (any version) if you want to-and if you do, you’ll be able to install Windows applications and run them in-a-box directly from Leopard. The OSes will live in separate partitions but the file system will be shareable and OS X will be the primary OS. With such a version of OS X, all the reasons not to use Apple (other than price) simply disappear. And Apple’s potential market increases dramatically. The number of Windows users moving to Apple will just grow.