"Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!"

Apple ran its own Switch ad today, announcing they will transition their processor supply from IBM to Intel over the next two calendar years. I have recently commented on rumors that Apple would announce exactly this.

According to a Keynote attendant who posted on MacNN, the processor of choice is currently a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4, which disappointed me. My hope was that along with a shift to Intel, Apple would announce some kind of venture to use a new 64-bit chipset, but they seem to be currently married to the aging x86 family. "I'd hate for [Apple] to be shacking up with a corpse," opines my dear friend and Pop Culture Zombie Scott. Apple intends to make available to developers a version of Tiger that runs on an Intel machine.

Apple was clearly stuck between a rock and a hard place. They represented a fraction of IBM's business, and IBM was more engrossed in delivering innovations to the next generation of all three game consoles. IBM had failed to deliver on Apple's promise of 3.0 GHz 64-bit computing. AMD and Intel were the only viable alternatives, and they chose Intel. The least Apple could do is keep Intel Inside stickers off of their future products.

I suppose the biggest question to ask is, Does Intel need Apple more than Apple needs Intel?

The Shape of Days offers some great insight that Mac users should take to heart.