by , 12:00 PM EDT, September 3rd, 2003
The two biggest International Sports when it comes to Apple are declaring the company to be dead or dying, and announcing that Apple will be Moving to Intel, Soon™. Observer Sean O. sent us a heads up on a new player in the latter sport, an Australian reviews magazine called Smarthouse Magazine. From Smarthouse's self-description:
Smarthouse Magazine and Smarthouse Web site are the premier Australian and New Zealand information source for lifestyle consumer technologies such as Home Theatre, Home Automation, Cutting Edge Appliances and Consumer Computing.
Smarthouse's cover story on its home today is the news that "Apple [is] Set to Go Intel." That's right, after announcing the big shift to the new 64-bit PowerPC G5, and asking its developers to kindly retool their apps accordingly, Smarthouse says that Apple will be unveiling new Intel made Itanium-based Macs this January, at Macworld San Francisco. From the magazine's article:
The first system is expected to shown at Macworld San Francisco in January 2004 according to an Apple US source. The initial plan will involve Apple offering both existing RISC processor systems and an Intel based system with the RISC processor from IBM system being phased out as new software is developed. An original idea to release a duel platform MAC has been scrapped according to Apple insiders in San Francisco.
There's more in the full article at Smarthouse's Web site. Apple's policy is to not comment on future products, especially rumors of this nature.
In a word: Notgonnahappen.
Our guess is that the folks at Smarthouse simply don't understand the crazy world of made up Apple rumors, nor do they apparently understand the Mac market or the very difficult world of software development. Smarthouse is, after all, a consumer electronics review magazine.
We'll be prepared to say we were wrong in the event that we are, but we won't be writing up any drafts of the apology note ahead of time.