Cringely on crack Cringely advocates Apple offering Mac OS X on x86 architecture, arguing that software is higher margin than hardware, and this would increase Apple's profits without damaging their hardware sales.

I say Cringely is on crack, and Apple is too. Cringely is dead wrong saying that OS X on cheap x86 architecture would not cut into Apple's hardware sales--the PowerMac G4 in particular would be utterly decimated. And Apple can't shake it's hardware addiction, it *has* to sell boxes to manage revenue and profit in the near (1-2 year) term. Sun also has this hardware addiction, making it the Apple of the Unix world. Similarly, Microsoft has an OS addiction, meaning its new application servers *must* run on Windows NT (gussied up as .NET servers). This makes them supremely vulnerable to a vendor who just makes applications that run on commodity OS (GNU/Linux) running on commodity hardware (x86). Microsoft's OS habit is the greatest threat to its .NET strategy.