Follow up on An Apple in your Intel PC

I had a post over at Running Scared yesterday, An Apple in your Intel PC, where I discussed Apple Computer's decision to move from Power PC chips from IBM to Intel x86 microprocessors. Jack Grant gives us his thoughts on the move today.

I strongly disagree with the statement by Steve Jobs that "Intel has the strongest processor road map by far," however I am sure I am biased.

I feel that the PowerPC road map is the strongest when evaluated by power, temperature, and operations per second criteria, relatively closely followed by AMD, with Intel running a poor third.

However, Intel can deliver large volumes of chips for a low cost, because of their advantages of scale.

So, in the end, it comes down to cost, not quality, as it always does.

I agree with Jack that Intel comes in number three in performance but they are number one in economy and that's unfortunately is what counts. My comment over on Jack's post:

Making a better machine isn't always enough. Apple has it's loyal followers but was unable to gain market share in spite of a widespread loathing of Microsoft. IBM is responsible for us being stuck with the inferior chips from Intel and the horrible DOS based Microsoft operating system because when they made those choices for the first PC at which time we were trapped.
I wonder if this is an attempt by Apple and Jobs to get out of the hardware business and into the OS/software business. Apple can't grow with the current base in spite of it being better on all fronts.