Apple's future has looked bleak for years. Their market share has been below 5% of all PC sales for a long time. This means Intel (and even AMD) have much greater economies of scale than Motorola (which makes the PowerPC chip that Apple uses). And the advantages of these economies of scale have been making an impact. The best Apple processor costs much more than the equivalent PC processor and the best PC processors blow away their Apple counterparts. This is one of the reasons the Pixar (the computer animation shop that created Toy Story) has announced a switch to Intel hardware.

Motorola has no incentive to invest literally billions of dollars in a vain attempt to compete with Intel and AMD given the sparse market for Apple Computers. Indeed, Apple is lucky Motorola still produces PowerPC chips after Apple betrayed them (if you are not familiar with this history, Motorola had an agreement with Apple that they could make Apple clones; and Apple abruptly canceled the agreement after Motorola had made significant investments in this area). So how is Apple going to survive?

It looks like they have two ideas. According to John Dvorak; Apple will start using Intel hardware within the next 12 to 18 months. A switch to Intel hardware will then allow Apple to be hardware competitive for the first time in years and they will keep a level playing field since Microsoft will obviously stay on the Intel/AMD platforms. If Apple can pull it off, this is a very wise (and long-overdue) move.

Their second idea is to put Al Gore on their board of directors. While there are exceptions (e.g., Rush Limbaugh's organization uses Macs); most Mac users tend to be fall on the liberal side of the spectrum. It looks like Steve Jobs is well aware of this fact and is hopeful that Gore supporters will express their support with their future PC purchases.