[Macworld]

Post your comments for Remains of the Day: Quid pro quo here

[MacTechAspen]

"let’s just Tim Cook’s"

Missing some hope?

[tsarkon]

Apple would never drop their in-house dev of processors. So, Intel is out of the equation. The real options are said to be TSMC and Global Foundries.

[wesley96]

While I'm sure Apple isn't going to switch to x86 for iOS devices overnight, one should note that iOS for x86 is alive and well in the form of Xcode iOS Simulator. Most iOS developers probably compiled their apps for testing in x86 binary at least once.

Therefore, if Apple ever wants to move the iOS platform to x86 due to certain circumstances, it can pull it off, just like the 68k -> PowerPC -> x86 transitions for Macs. Of course, Android can do the same as well, seeing there's an actual x86-based Android phone out in the market already.

Based on these points, I'm sure Apple is always has the door open, and is likely to have some preliminary discussions with Intel about this from time to time.

There's another possibility of Apple using Intel as a foundry. While this route will result in an Apple-designed, Intel-manufactured ARM SoC that'll be literally years ahead of competition, the low price will be a big turn-off for Intel. This might make into the Apple-Intel discussion as well, but I see this less likely than the first one. If Intel was ever going to keep interest in the ARMs race, it wouldn't have sold its StrongARM division nearly a decade ago.

[redgeminipa]

"it wouldn't have sold its StrongARM division nearly a decade ago."

A decade ago, mobile processors weren't what they are today. I'm sure it's more like Intel is now thinking about the old adage: hindsight is 20/20.

[whitedog]

Moving the iPad to an x86 Intel chip will make sense eventually. As the hardware gets more capable and more power efficient, running OS X on an a version of the iPad seems a natural, if not an inevitable development. Keeping the price down may be the biggest challenge. Apple will have the advantage of learning from Microsoft's mistakes with Windows 8/Metro and the RT tablet. The first lesson will be that a low price won't matter if the hardware and the tablet version of the OS cannot cut it. Microsoft had the chance to learn that lesson from the fate of netbooks (as well as from their own failed PC tablet efforts over the last decade), but apparently chose not to do so (long live Steve Balmer). And the kludgy interface between Metro and Windows 8 is the other lesson. Apple is gradually moving in the direction of a touch interface for OS X with improvements to their gesture sensitive input devices for the Mac. But obstacles remain. The iOS and OS X have dramatically different filing systems. How these are integrated in the next few years will be telling. iCloud seems to be the test platform for the project, as it endeavors to keep documents from the iOS and OS X versions of Apple apps in sync.