How Fast Can Apple Grow?
Right now, Apple is growing 40% year-over-year while using PowerPC-based hardware. While they may not win the GHz speed wars, they do win on looks, overall performance, reliability, functionality, and elegance. Now imagine Apple offering a dual-core 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 system that has the looks and elegance of the Power Mac G5. Further imagine that Microsoft, never one to overlook an opportunity to sell Windows, ports Virtual PC to OS X on Intel. No more CPU emulation, so Windows on a Macintel computer should be close to the performance on a dedicated Windows PC. Do you see the potential to bring in switchers who won’t need to leave their Windows apps behind? It’s huge! Unless Apple really botches things, Intel-based Macs will have the same stability OS X users are used to, and clock speed will be directly comparable with Windows computers. Factor in Virtual PC, and Apple could quickly rise to 10% market share. Another benefit of putting OS X on Intel is that Apple could produce a fully
