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If you didn’t know Apple announced today that that they will be using Intel processors. This is a big move and tons of people have weighed in, so in my little corner of the web, I’m going to also.

Over the years Apple has been known to do some crazy things. For better or for worse (Sometimes both, I generally thing for the better) Apple makes choices that don’t always make sense.

For example in 1998 we saw the first iMacs. These crazy blue green computers were insane. People didn’t know what to think about them. It’s not exaggeration to say that iMacs changed the way people think about computers and products as a whole. We’re still seeing colored toasters and computer’s that aren’t in beige boxes (and not just from Apple). Along with the crazy design and move away from yellow-grey computers, Apple did two things: they got rid of the floppy, and got rid of all sorts ports and went all USB. The iMac was one of the first computers to do this, and probably the most popular one of it’s time.
Both of these choices, along with the visual design changes of the iMac have carried a bit of weight. There isn’t a single Apple computer that ships with a floppy drive any longer. In fact there is very few computers at all that do. For example Dell, as far as my quick check of their website can tell, sells no computers that come with one standard. Floppies in my opinion are an obsolete technology, they are prone to failure and data loss, and it was a great move. CDs and CD-Rs have taken their place if the internet hasn’t, there’s no room for floppies any longer. But at the time it was a major pain, lots of people still used the unreliable floppy and almost everyone bought a floppy drive for their new iMacs. People complained, said that Apple was stupid for getting rid of something so important. Now the floppy is dead.
The second of these changes was a little bit more questionable from a business standpoint. As Apple tends to do with their drastic changes they adopted a very new technology, USB. What?! No Serial? No ADB? None of the old ports?! That’s right, Apple did away with them there was only the aptly named Universal Serial Bus. This made it so all those people that wanted floppies had to buy new drives and not just something they saw on the cheap shelves the other day it had to be brand new and USB. Not only did you have to get a new floppy drive, but a new printer, a new scanner, all new peripherals, that is if you could find one that used the brand new USB. It was a bit of a pain, some people were angry, some people were happy. Now you can’t find a computer that doesn’t come with USB ports, even PC makers are eliminating anything other than USB these days.
Apple has made other major internal changes that haven’t effected others like the ones above, but they’ve happened. All long time Mac users, like myself, we’ve seen our share of changes that Apple has, in their secretive ways, seemingly made on a whim. This is another one of those changes. But this is unlike previous internal changes because this is big. This is big for Apple and it’s big for everyone else.
It’s big for Apple because of course there is always the Mac vs. PC thing, Macs have always used a different processor than their Windows and/or Linux running cousins and this competition has even seen Apple releasing ads “Publicly Toasting Intel”. Now that’s not the case. This means that it’s very possible that you might be able to buy a Dell and buy Mac OS X, no more windows. It also means that you could buy an Apple, and run Windows on it if you wanted to (why you’d want to, I’m not sure :p). There’s too much that could happen but it’s going to big, it’s going to drive some people crazy and drive them away, and it’s going to bring people in.
For better or worse Apple has thrown their lot in with the unknown, it’s worked out ok in the past and I hope it does in the future. I for one thing that this is a good thing. I can finally get some bargaining chips when convincing people to switch to a Mac, and some in switching to an Apple computer, because in the future one might not mean the other.