Originally Posted by ScottC
Pentiums have been the laughing stock of every Mac owner for years, they were "slow", "power hungry", "warm" etc... Hence my having to laugh at the current situation.
FWIW, I understand that the mobo in the ADC dev machines is is made by no other than.... INTEL
An Intel chip, and an Intel board, it doesn't get any better than that.
The speed always depended on what the user was doing.
Power hungry- Pentiums did require a great deal more juice at one time and were a lot warmer at one time. That hasn't been the case for a while, which is why those are benefits that are no longer promoted and haven't been for years.
It's no surprise that the boards are made by Intel. First, they're development machines, Apple would need to partner with Intel's engineering teams on motherboard design, and it's only one more progression to see them manufactured by Intel. Second, The more manufacturers that are disclosed to the partnership prior to announcement the greater the chance that the news would have leaked sooner than it did. Having the board built by another party would have increased this risk.
To me this partnership is analogous to the one Apple forged with IBM for the G5 processor. Both companies were both bitter rivals but leveraged each other when it benefited them mutually.
We see similar competition/cooperation relationships in other partners of Apple, including Sony, Microsoft, HP, Adobe, even Dell, which once sold iPods prior to coming out with the DJ.
Companies do it all the time. Toyota licensed its hybrid technology to Ford a couple of years ago, and Ford brought a hybrid SUV to the US market before Toyota rolled theirs out.
It's an interesting change in direction, yes, but it's not totally unexpected either. It's been fairly common knowledge that x86 versions of OS X have continued to be developed since NextStep was acquired by Apple.