Good points made by both Paul and Michael, but even so I'm sure Apple are very aware of this (especially after the catastrophic failure of their previous cloning attempt) and will have some kind of spanner to fling into the works. There are, to quote the ever logical Mr Rumsfeld, some known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns ââ'¬â€œ the only evidence as to what a Intel Mac will be like is the lashed together P4 developer machines, which the more I think about it the more I suspect will turn out to be a red herring ââ'¬â€œ these machines will I suspect probably turn out to be Intel Mac enough to develop on, but probably bare little resemblance to the final product, i.e. they will do what they were designed to do whilst Jobs keeps the real plan of action contained.
Remember that the Apple / Intel deal is not one sided - Apple have not 'given up' and decided to make PC clones and gone cap in hand to Intel - Intel have desperately wanted to make CPUs for Apple since the year dot, and I'm sure will produce a very attractive package as a result. I strongly suspect Intel will actually pull an Apple specific CPU out of the bag, if not there is still no need at all for a Apple computer to have anything recognisable as a PC architecture at all, i.e. there is no reason it should have anything remotely similar in the way of motherboard architecture etc. As with any software I'm sure there will be cracks to some degree, but I'd be amazed if they were useful enough to spread into the real public domain, i.e. outside a very tight core of uber-geeks who do this kind of thing simply to prove it can be done.
Tony.
