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Apple and Intel seems to be the hot subject at the moment. Cringley is saying that Apple and Intel could be merging to take out Microsoft and rule the known universe.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

Seriously, I didn’t even consider this as a possibility. It vaguely makes sense… you know, if you’re a crack fiend with delusions of grandeur. As much as I want to see Microsoft’s head on a pike outside on the lawn of One Infinite Loop, merging with Intel isn’t going to do this.

However, this does give Intel a leg up on nearly everyone. Dell is one of the largest PC manufacturers, and even though Intel sells CPUs and other parts to Dell, Intel gets the shit end of the deal. Intel manufactures CPUs, motherboards, northbridge and southbridge chips, video chips, sound chips, everything you need to actually build a computer short of mass storage drives and memory; merging with Apple would give them a well known desktop/workstation manufacturing plant to be able to put all these parts together and sell them cheaply en masse.

Intel and Apple would be, ultimately, a vertical integration model. Intel could use its own hardware cheaply (no need to sell to a third party), and the consumer could pay for hardware what 3rd party vendors pay. Seeing as 3rd party vendors mark up stuff like 500% to make a huge profit, and Intel is already marking stuff up that much, both Intel and the consumer would win; Dell goes off into a corner and shoots itself, and Microsoft’s Wintel platform goes down the tubes.

All Apple needs now is it’s own distribution of Wine to bring in ABI compatibility with Win32 apps, and Apple has basically crushed the resistance. Via la Apple!