Sun says, 'Apple, pick us, pick us!'

to Steve M, poster #2, are you high? NextOS ran on NeXT hardware, which means it first ran on a Motorola 68030 with a 68881/2 math co-processor and a custom Motorola DSP chip that later also inhabited the Atari Falcon. That was long before the NextStep OS migration to x86. Apple should just buy up Sun and put it out of its misery. Keep the intellectual property, keep the OS engineers to beef up OS X even more, transfer any chip engineers to further work on PPC/Cell design, and sell the hardware biz to IBM, HP, or Dell to dismantle.

The cost of Intel chips is almost twice the cost of IBM chips... I see a real benefit in moving to Intel - more virus' and worms - NOT... it isn't the chip, it is the OS and you will see people JUMP to MacOS when they see that it can run on an Intel chipset... Apple (Steve Jobs) is a very market savy guy - now - and sees the real benefit of being able ot meet market demand - which he has not been able to do with IBM in all the days that Apple has been using IBM's PowerPC - supply is why... IMHO

Why do people keep stating that switching to Intel chips would lower Apple's costs, without providing any evidence to back up the assertion? My understanding was that PowerPC chips are in general less expensive than Pentium chips (see here, for example: http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/intel_apple_odds_and_ends).

What shame? How would it be a shame if Apple switched to Intel. What lots of people are fogetting is that NeXT OS was on the Intel platform long before Steve and NeXT moved back to Apple and created OS X. The move to Intel will probably be very smooth and give Apple a much needed pump in the arm. Lower costs, faster processors, and no more arguments about which processor is best. Apple could finally compete head to head with Microsoft for the OS, and not worry about hardware compatibility issues.

Seeing as OS X runs on top of Darwin, and Darwin already runs on x86 processors, where is the benefit in building OSX on Solaris? Apple are perfectly capable of handling the transition without SUN. That said, I'm seriously considering giving up computers and becoming a hermit if Apple moves to x86 chips, the shame, the shame....