Apple, the self proclaimed creator and pioneer of GUI computing as we know it, has been fairly hell bent on keeping everything in-house and proprietary including hardware locking its OS and the irritatingly un-functional single button mouse.

Today, unlike the beginning, Apple Computer feels rather underpowered when compared to the systems with AMD Athlon and Intel EE processors. Add to this the fact that they are extremely expensive and you know why Apple is not the market leader in any segment (iPods apart and even there only the hard drive based devices. Sony has piped Apple in the flash based MP3 players by a fair margin).

Of course they look pretty and have a serious "wow" factor but imagine if we could run the Mac OS X on an Athlon FX with some seriously fast RAM from Corsair and nice SLI motherboard from Gigabyte. Nirvana, if you ask me.

No matter how much Steve Jobs harps about his calligraphy lessons in college, I don’t much care about the exactness of space between tiny icon labels. Give me speedier apps and more power any day.

It seems Apple has realised that it is selling underpowered systems and that consumer’s demand for power is going to go up at least exponentially and have now decided to partner with Intel for processors. This has no doubt caused a furore in the Apple community. Others are claiming that with processor manufacturing being outsourced to Intel, the price of Apple systems will fall.

I really don’t think so. You need to only look at the not-so-fine print that says the chips will be custom built for Apple. In other words, only as many chips will be made as Apple demands, and since Apple is not cutting prices any time soon, the lack of volume will hike the price and we are back to that small little square labelled "ONE".

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