by , 10:00 AM EST, April 1st, 2003
After an absence of several years, Apple has announced that it will reintroduce the PC Compatibility Card for Macintosh. The PC Compatibility Card provides hardware support for Windows XP to run on native Intel hardware in a dual-boot Mac. What may come as a surprise to many long-term Apple watchers is that Apple has partnered with super appliance maker Dell to provide the cards.
While Apple and Dell have traditionally been at odds -- billionaire CEOs Steve Jobs (Apple) and Michael Dell (Dell) have been known to disparage each other's companies in the past -- cost and opportunity apparently drew the two companies together for the new project, which was code named Poisson d'Avril within Apple.
"We kept crunching the numbers," said Steve Jobs in a statement, "and the fact is that we could buy this thing from Dell cheaper than we could make it ourselves." Dell is known for making cheap computers in the Wintel world. "It's what they do," explained Mr. Jobs. "They make cheap PCs."
For Dell, the chance to sell computers to 3% of the market they would normally not have access to was the lure.
"Hey, we had to get more market share somehow," said Michael Dell. "Besides, we already sell the iPod." Dell currently sells the Windows version of the iPod at its retail Web site.
The Apple PC Compatibility Card will carry the Dell logo, although it will be available exclusively through the Apple Store and some of the company's Apple Specialist retailers. Perhaps more importantly, the product will allow Apple to use the coveted "Intel Inside" labels on Macs that include the card. By advertising "Intel Inside" in Apple's marketing, Intel will pay a percentage of those advertising costs as part of Intel's standard partner branding program.
An Intel spokesperson told TMO that the project has been in the works for some time. "There's been a lot of speculation about Apple and Intel, especially since Steve [Jobs] was the keynote speaker at our sales conference earlier this year," offered the spokesperson. "Now you know why."
Mr. Jobs appearance at the sales conference helped renew rumors that Apple might be porting Mac OS X to Intel's processors, but today's announcement from the company seems to explain the relationship. Occam would no doubt be pleased.
On the technical side, the Apple PC Compatibility Card will run Windows XP only, and Dell has reportedly worked with Microsoft and Apple to ensure smoother operation of the card. In order to limit Apple's support costs, the cards will not run any other x86 operating systems, including Linux. It is not known how this block was implemented, and Apple wouldn't respond to our questions on this issue.
The cards will come in two version:
Both units are available now.
Seriously, though, this is a great move for the company. Why should users have to choose between Mac OS X and Windows, when they can have both?
Be that as it may, this move answers many questions. For one thing, the Intel-thing can be finally put to bed. It would seem that Mac OS X will remain a PowerPC-based OS. The other thing it clears up is why in the heck Apple wasn't concerned when Microsoft purchased Virtual PC from Connectix. Why sweat software emulation when you can have native hardware support? The gearheads can argue about how the PCI bus will be a limiting factor on performance, let alone the Cardbus bus, but we think these new products will allow most users to get what they need from Windows on their Mac.