"Intel's Itanium effort collapsed in the face of AMD's 64-bit, x86-compatible Opteron."
IOW, Apple will eventually switch to AMD -- unless they get smart and dump Steve Jobs instead.
I'm not so sure about that. Intel must have something in the pipeline that Apple likes, possibly the Yonah chip (dual core Pentium M.) Yonah is going to be introduced in January 2006, which fits in perfectly with Apple's transition timeline.