I do believe that the smaller companies like Gateway and Acer will either go bankrupt or get eaten up (by whom I don’t know). Other companies like Sony and Toshiba may decide to abandon PCs and stick to other items like TVs and DVD players.

I can say this though. I’ve been mulling over whether or not to buy a Mac and pony up the money for new software, or just stick with the PC. This little nugget of information has pushed me into Mac land.

Apple does not attempt to compete with companies like dell, gateway, hp, and a million others. If anything, it will be with companies like upper end pc’s like Sony. They don’t want to get into a slugfest for $2 profit, but they might for $200+ on the upper end.

Also don’t forget that Apple said that they would not inhibit Windows running on their hardware, but that is far different from “we will be writing drivers to ensure that our hardware runs on windows and we will be including windows as an OS option.”

Because they haven’t said the above, then you would be looking at spending a premium price on the mac and then buying windows to load on it, when the hardware manufacturer might not even write the drivers. Now that’s a waste. What this may mean for mac users like me, is that when I get desperate for a better sellection of video games, that I might be able to dual boot my mac to run windows where I can get some more titles. But I don’t think it means that windows or DELL are going away anytime soon. : (

Historically, there just hasn’t been brand loyalty in the Windows-compatible hardware market. Dell came close, but has lost ground significantly with recent declines in service. Apple can walk in with a sensible line-up of machines, using consistent components from one manufacturing run to the next, and thus cure a lot of the he-said-she-said nature of e.g. video card support. Even selling slightly more closed boxes at a slightly higher price: as long as they work better, people will buy them.

Specifically, they’ll buy them to run Windows. Or they’ll buy them to indulge a curiosity about this whole “Mac” thing, provided rock solid assurances that they can erase it and run what they’re familiar with if/when it turns out that change isn’t their thing.

As a result, Apple may quickly vault to be the No. 2 or No. 3 volume supplier of Windows-compatible PCs. Which is a fine sustainable position from which to continue the conversation of whether one’s computing future is best served by Windows.

All that looks good. But the biggest danger, and the reason I think people aren’t saying much or getting their hopes up, comes down to Microsoft’s historical willingness to play along. That utopian vision can still be shut down with only three words: “Service Pack 3.”

[and now for some shout-outs...]

Juanxer: good points, but don’t look at Apple’s enterprise and federal performance pre-Jobs; look at NeXT’s. It’s been a slow, steady march with the Xserve, XRAID, XSAN and such but they’ve been building a decent reputation from sub-zero.

Larry Hastings: you’re right, Jobs shut down the licensing program. At a time when he still openly said he did his e-mail from a PC laptop. The question is, did he do this because he dislikes licensing, or because the timing wasn’t right for Apple’s bargaining position? I remember supremely heated WWDC sessions protesting the cancelling of Mentat STREAMS in favor of BSD sockets. What we didn’t know, but they did, was they would soon announce the core OS becoming open source.

The timing wasn’t right in 1997 to switch to Intel, or to license the OS, or to do much of anything except survive. A lot of pieces had to be put into place first, including basic repairs to supply line, Internet/interoperability philosophy, public image, and cash position. The timing wasn’t right in 2004 for a video iPod, either, but the plan was in place…