“Before getting into what Apple can do to turn its Mactel mistake into the pure gold of market opportunity, lets take a moment to think about how it got here,” Paul Murphy writes for ZDNet in a followup to this article. “IBM failed to meet Apple’s needs on both volume and performance while claiming to be making best efforts to meet those needs. At the same time those best efforts were failing, however, it successfully designed and built a three core, 3.2Ghz, Altivec equiped processor for Microsoft and a 4Ghz capable Cell board containing a G5+ master control CPU (again Altivec equiped) for itself and its partners Sony and Toshiba.”

“Apple’s decision to drop IBM as a supplier amounted to chewing off a leg to escape a death trap – sensible in the circumstances and something which would have been a non issue if Plan B had been updated in the last few years and a better alternative architecture selected,” Murphy writes. “Unfortunately, however, Plan B hadn’t been updated for years; they made the Intel decision, have now seen some of the consequences, and therefore face some tough choices.”

“So what can Apple do? Two things: 1) Re-establish the Mac as a premium product by dropping Intel as a CPU supplier and signing a three to five year deal with Freescale to use the e600 and subsequent e700 series processors. 2) Make the MacOS X integration shell and related Apple software available as a software only package for Linux. Taken together these two steps would strengthen the brand while buying developer loyalty, a new revenue stream, time, customer confidence, and market position,” Murphy writes.

Full article, in which Murphy concludes, “Steve Jobs, and Apple, could apply the Midas touch to MacTel simply by killing it -producing a far better outcome for Apple than the best they can hope for in sticking with Intel,” here.

MacDailyNews Take: Murphy’s really, really not happy with Apple’s Intel move.

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