Going for Broke
Look, I'm the first to say that I am horribly bad at predicting the future of ... well ... anything. But Cringely is so far out in left field with this one, it isn't even funny.
A: Even if Intel LOATHED MS, I would wager they still make the VAST majority of their money selling PCs that happen to run Windows. The thought of them turning on that relationship is not something that you do on a whim. They have a lot more hope of success going with Linux than with Apple, considering Apple (just like Intel) makes their money selling hardware and therefore are going to be competitive more than they are complimentary.
B: Cringely seems to be missing public disclosures already made:
OS X 10.4 -- Tiger -- is a 64-bit OS, remember, yet Intel's 64-bit chips -- Xeon and Itanium -- are high buck items aimed at servers, not iMacs. So is Intel going to do a cheaper Itanium for Apple or is Apple going to pretend that 64-bit never existed?Mr. Cringely apparently missed the announcement, and shipping, of the 64-Bit Pentium 4s. The fact is that Mr. Cringely does not realize that the chip is totally irrelevant to the Mac. All they have ever cared about is faster, better, cheaper (though the same argument could be made about all PC users). If Apple is able to deliver the same product (done) running existing applications (done) running on hamsters in a wheel in the middle of the machine (tbd), the users won't care! As long as a user is able to run the application they care about in the same way they do today and faster without having to buy a new copy, they'll be ecstatic. Compability layer? Possibly, you could dual boot or you could run it in a virtual machine, but OS/2 tried that and everyone just ignored the OS/2 APIs and programmed for Win32. As far as Mr. Cringely is concerned, I don't know why I keep reading his column; he hasn't been right for years.