Had they done this 10-15 years ago, they might have had a shot at remaining a viable competitor in the PC market.
That's OK, Apple owns the MP3 player market. They're not going to repeat the mistakes of last time, either.
Microsoft's "Urge" music store isn't iPod compatible. I predict it's not going to go anywhere. And as more and more people buy iPods (14 *million* this quarter alone), they're going to want Macs to go with them....
The war isn't over yet.
They really couldn't have, not until they change to OS-X. Its a unix based OS, so the porting was alot easier. So much of the earlier macs was tied to processor specific nuances, the change from the 68000 to the PPC was quite painful. Other than "endian" issues which are fairly easy to resolve for software writers, this change has been fairly simple.
Day Late, Dollar short. In other news...
10-15 years ago there would have been a lot of red faces given the fanatic rwars over Motorola vs. Intel, particularly on the Motorola users.
IMHO, it wasn't so much the CPU as it was their insistance on being the sole source of the system hardware (not add-ons, but the system itself).
One of the big reasons the Intel-based IBM-compatible PC took off was competition in the hardware marketplace - initially Compaq, now in modern times, there is Dell, Gateway, etc.
Wintel gets bashed a lot, but the Mac platform seems to get a free pass when it is actually one of the most closed platforms around.
They are viable. I own Apple sock that has gained in value steadily, since I bought it a little over two years ago. My little investment has become a very substantial nest egg.
I bought at 13 3/8. It split 2-1. It is trading at 80.86 this afternoon. That is roughly 1200+ % that it has done in those two years.
Now, then what do you say is wrong with them?