roughlydrafted is the most obnoxious mac fanboy website out there, it filled with conspiracy theory, unsubstantiated accusations, imaginary superiority of apple products, "100% you can count on"biased comparison of apple products and others. to call it "news magazine" is a disgrace to the professional term.

I would be surprised if IBM went total Mac.

Reasons:

1) They have their own chips, with their own brand of Linux, which they have been pushing very hard, and been doing quite well with.

2) Apple dropped IBM to go with Intel. There must be a little bad blood in the air between Apple and IBM.

Just my 2 Cents.

?????

IBM is the largest developer for Linux - but it has no "IBM Linux"

Traditionally, as SUSE Linux was 64 bit 10 years ago, it was the most common Linux to run on the RS/6000 line if you didn't need the power and capabilities of AIX. But "their own brand of Linux, which they have been pushing very hard" - Where? In your dreams?

More erroneous assumptions masquerading as fact.

"Bad blood"?
The fact was, there was little incentive for IBM to allocate additional resources to further develop a legacy Power4 technology to develop a lower power consumptive G5 when they were effectively near the end of the Power6 life cycle!

And nice as the Power technology is (and it is!), the single CPU desktop is not the model that the Power technology is oriented towards, and the small market provided by Mac did not justify allocating increasing resources for such a limited return. The shift by Apple to a commoditized x86 product oriented toward its market segment made sense to all concerned - even IBM.

Bottomline, the Mac would offer IBM a platform that could effective unify/cover all of the bases of its product offerings, ranging from Windows to Linux to AIX due to the native compatibility of OSX with all as well as the ability to run VM environments.

This is simply the enterprise recognizing the same advantages that many clients have already realized!

IBM mnakes it's money doing consulting.. So it's customers will tell them what type of OS they need to use. So maybe they have a customer asking to create intergration for BSD and OSx??

Always trust a blogger for the latest and most accurate news - yeah right.

There are two major players in the corporate OS world - Microsoft and IBM (Linux is getting there, I know..but we're talking immediate future). If Apple were to get real cozy with their diametric opposite, maybe those opposites would attract and bear some serious fruit. That is a marriage Microsoft definitely doesn't want to see. I think most users (myself included) could care less whose hardware or OS are under the hood as long as we can run the old Windows programs that can't be replaced while still having a decent selection of new software..and have it all be stable and affordable. (For me, it would also need to have a fairly customizable desktop. I have no idea how well Macs do there.) A tall order, but certainly within reach of a combined Apple-IBM solution..and hey, it would probably have a lotta *nix inside. Frankly, I'm getting increasingly annoyed with PCs, and by that I really mean PCs running Windows since all new PCs are x86 now. If I could get a Mac for, say, 15% more than a comparable PC, I would give it very serious consideration - but at twice the price? Not a chance.

psycros:
What double price ?

http://www.popularmechan...ews/4258725.html?page=4

The Verdict: Apple

Mac: In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple?s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn?t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple?s platform-switching Boot Camp software?and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

PC: Simply put, Vista proved to be a more sluggish operating system than Leopard. Our PCs installed some software faster, but in general they were slower in our time trials. Plus, both PCs showed weaker performance on third-party benchmarks than the Macs. Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway?s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot?and still save $100

You know, what makes the continuing debate between the Apple and MS camps so tiresome is the continuation of the same nonsensical misinformation based upon cliches and ignorance masquerading as insight.

The 15 year old adage about Macs being incompatible and costing more has grown quite old. Especially as it has remained the mantra of idiots. Yup - idiots.

And this is due in part to the myriad "PC users" - despite the Mac now simply being a PC! as well as to the arrogance of Apple!

Incompatible - yeah, right. Where did this plum come from? In 1993 the Mac went with an obscure networking protocol called TCP/IP.

MS used NetBIOS until ~2004. NetBIOS didn't support TCP/IP - hence with the larger installed base of Windows boxes, that made TCP/IP the obscure technology.

Yup - TCP/IP is history...right? Well, it is in the sense that it is now the standard! Ooops!

The Mac is a PC. It is the latest incarnation of the "Intel Roadmap". That is not a made up phrase. Attend an Intel Developer's Forum and find out! In fact, the 'PC market' lags behind the Mac in this regard by virtue of the need to support the legacy (read OLD) versions of Windows that present a terribly fragmented MS user base! The fact is, they ALL use a 32 bit proprietary BIOS instead of the latest 64 bit EFI BIOS developed by Intel that Apple chose - as they didn't have to worry about supporting 13 year old versions of the OS!

Not only are too many of the erudite 'PC users' completely ignorant of the fact. But Apple has done little to nothing to educate the user base - be it Mac users or prospective PC buyers of the fact. Instead, they have gone with cutesy commercials that do little to educate the market space - opting for image over substance.

And this "Macs cost more". 15 years ago Apple could have easily addressed this issue with infomercials that explained the fact tat Macs included SCSI based plug and play, integrated graphics and audio for the ~$300 fee - less than what you outfit an equivalent PC for. But instead, they chose to sell image instead of explaining substance and functionality in a manner the average parent who had to buy a computer for their kid could understand.

But no - remember we are dealing with Apple - the company that sells image based upon what Bono is seen using. The irony is that the majority of Mac users have no clue that underneath the GUI they are running the most widely distributed and most POSIX compliant version of UNIX on the market (while the strength is that they need Not know!). In that respect, they are just like the majority of "IT experts" who post here! Both are clueless of the fact! But, unlike the users, the IT folks Should know!

And regards to the price? Surprisingly, the Mac is very competitively priced with other retail machines. Granted, anyone who buys Apple's RAM and larger hard drives at their obscene prices is a fool, but for the base price, the machines are competitive. And the MacPro, with dual quad-core XEON processors starting at ~$2800, they are a downright steal compared to their PC competition.

But one would have to actually be aware of what they are talking about to know that instead of merely mouthing the same tired 15 year old mantra.

Now, this is not to say you need a Mac. Certainly you can build a machine for a bit less. And you can support it too. But for the mass market who is not into this, the Mac offers not only a competitively priced machine, but also one heck of an OS that has the power of UNIX as well as compatibility with Windows. And you can run Windows and Linux natively as well if you like. You just get an extra option not easily implemented on a standard non-Apple PC.

Twice the price? Oh yeah, you must be talking about one of those ~$6400 PC gamer platforms with a single quad core extreme cpu...now there's the real joke!

Sorry - I replied to the wrong posting...I agree completely with your position!

Such a move would be wise on the part of IBM - and it also underscores the broader opportunity Apple has IF ONLY it would address both the broader market and the enterprise market and recognize the opportunity it presents.

It would allow for the tight integration of the AIX backend tools with an elegant and flexible desktop and mid-range server that could natively scale from SMB to Enterprise.

Currently there is no easily executed bridge between UNIX backends and Windows desktops. OSX would not only bridge that gulf with native admin tools, but it would bring to the table the addition of the most POSIX compliant UNIX on the market and it could be made to run many of the AIX apps natively as well - a very attractive option for the SMB niche where they would have the power of the AIX tools running on a very attractive XServe of MacPro - with a MacBook or MacBook Pro as an ideal 'do it all' admin & client bridging Windows, Mac appls, Linux and AIX worlds without fussing with terminal emulation.

Now, if Apple would only come out with a no-holds barred power user desktop replacement version of the MacBook Pro that would effectively make me forget about a desktop!

In recent years Apple has been known to shoot itself in the foot more often than not.