Intel move could attract firms to Mac desktops

The plans were announced at Apple’s worldwide developer conference in San Francisco last week, where chief executive Steve Jobs demonstrated an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.4. The first commercial systems will ship in 2006, and Apple’s line-up will be Intel-only by the end of 2007, Jobs said.

The move could tempt many organisations into deploying Macs instead of Windows PCs for some staff, according to Ranjit Atwal of analyst Gartner.

Atwal said, “With Intel Macs, [Apple] has a hardware platform that businesses are more familiar with and the costs of owner- ship are better understood.”

Managing an extra desktop platform will not cause problems for companies, because most already run more than one version of Windows, Atwal added.

Apple declined to give any further details of next year’s Intel-based Macs. But a developer working on OS X applications told IT Week that the Intel Mac OS will run on Apple hardware only and not on standard PC systems.

However, Atwal argued that it could make more sense in the long term for Apple to open up its OS X for the wider PC market

instead of trying to compete with other hardware makers. “Apple needs to decide where the market is,” he added.

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