Satcomer, you've got to admit that speculating like this always makes the event that more interesting. You've got to have some wild and crazy speculations, otherwise it just takes the fun out of it all.
Captain Code, you are correct in that it was a good decision for them to move to Intel just as it was for Apple to move from 68K to PPC. But again, remember....back when the announcement was made in 2005, everyone said much of the same thing (along with griping at how Apple could make such a blatant about-face after years of telling us that Intel was crap...which it was until the Core series, let's be honest

). People said that it would be the beginning of the end of Apple and that people would just find a way to get them installed on their generic PCs. For the most part, they were right. However, look at what Microsoft has to deal with. Their operating systems are pirated more than anything all around the world. Don't you think MS knows that this is happening? Of course, they're going to go after the businesses that are running or selling pirated software...but what about the end user? Don't you think that as bad as it is for MS to have their operating systems and software pirated, that it in a sense is good for them as far as penetration? It sure has done them a world of good in many countries, so much so that even FLOSS is having some trouble in shaking people out of the Microsoft grip.
Now consider that people today are doing their darnedest to get OS X to run on their PCs, more so than ever now. So assuming that Apple were to make a version for generic PCs, the penetration (even through piracy means) would skyrocket because people would not have to recompile the kernel to support their own hardware (and pray that it actually does). Now remember that there was some news early this year about
Apple patenting a way to run checks on the hardware to make sure that the software being run was on genuine hardware. I don't know if this necessarily has anything to do with Macs at all, but it is something that might come into play don't you think? Right now, the only OS that requires a serial key is OS X Server. The worst that Apple could do is have it so that standard OS X does the same thing. Now, I'm sure this could easily be circumvented by plucky hackers as has been done on the Windows side, but would it really matter? It might be enough to keep the copyright police away since they are actively trying to prevent piracy, but the reality of it is that it may not and said piracy would in fact help in getting Apple some more market share. I'm not saying that this would be the best way, but sometimes even any kind of publicity (or exposure) is good, no?
Again, these are just wild thoughts of a tired man who needs his 40 winks. But stuff like this is what makes it fun before the keynote actually happens. Now my next question is who will bite on the whole "missing mid-range Mac" speculation....any takers?
