Rui CarmoYeah, right. The single sentence "Just think how many positives for IBM such a marriage would provide." is proof positive that this is just more pie-in-the-sky.
PowerPCs are not an IBM exclusive, so the initial premise (that Apple would not need to sign up for the consortia) is wrong in both counts - Apple also does not need to sign up with IBM because it only uses the chips, not create derivative works from the PowerPC architecture.
(Gosh, industry pundits are getting more and more clueless by the day. At least get your facts straight.)
Let me start a new rumor, then. I won't get into the iPhone stuff, though.
No... I'll just do what everyone else does: I'll pick an old rumor, wrap some dumb premises around it based on current news, and post it up on the net.
Here goes, then:
Apple Will Launch An Intel-Based Mac Within 18 Months
Looks like your typical rumor-monger headline, doesn't it? Now for the pseudo-facts: Why?
Well, because it won't sign up for the PowerPC consortia, obviously. Their not doing so (allegedly) paves the way for Darwin to be fine-tuned and Cocoa to be natively implemented on top of the Intel architecture, therefore making it easy for Apple to launch Macs that can natively run Windows applications inside a Mach subsystem (like the old Yellow Box).
Which, by the way, would entirely negate the advantages of running a Mac and sink Apple's business model.
But as rumors go, it's at least as plausible as the Register one - and I haven't wasted a single one of their dumb premises.