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"They already have it -- without the fanfare. Apple bought NExT. The NExT technology DOES/DID run on Intel."

Saying NeXTStep "runs" on Intel is generous. It crawls. I loooooved the pizza box machines and the cubes, but Intel boxes just didn't cut it.

I doubt that Apple will switch anytime soon. For reasons, look at the following examples:

1) NeXT. It just never work right or sold well when it was only an OS. NeXTStep was tied to the architecture of the box, and it was great where it belonged. Similarly, Solaris also sucks on intel. It's my favorite OS, running on a sparc, but I won't even use it as an xterm on intel.

2) Apple opened up to clones in the early-mid 90's. Customers were able to buy cheaper boxes running motorola chips. Working in an animation/video house at the time, I can tell you we had nothing but trouble from third party boxes. (Of course we had more trouble than most people do even with Apple boxes, but every machine was pushed to its limits every day. The Apple boxes held up better.)

Apple depends on knowing how everything in the box works and fits together. I don't think I would trust them to write an OS in the rough and tumble commodity world of intel hardware. Apple know more than any OS company out there about UI, but they have a horrible track record for writing software that runs anywhere but on a tightly controlled system.

Apple know more than any OS company out there about UI, but they have a horrible track record for writing software that runs anywhere but on a tightly controlled system.

Writing for Intel does increase one's problems exponentially, because now you also have to troubleshoot someone's hardware configuration. And you're right, to be efficient, Apple writes its OS with a deep knowledge of the hardware. This may not necessarily translate to the same performance against two different Intel boxes.

I can't say if Apple is as bad as Be when it comes to knowledge of the hardware, but I was extremely disappointed in BeOS. It was so cool and had so much promise, but I couldn't get it to install on one of my systems. I bought at a CompUSA 2 Toshiba Infinias on the same day. I installed BeOS on one, it worked like a champ. It would never install on the other one. I spent hours and hours and hours trying to figure it out- after consultation with Be, it turned out that there was a tiny rev difference in the chipset between the 2 machines. That was enough to make BeOS install on one Toshiba and not on the other. No wonder Be never made it! If Apple is that dependent on the hardware, it will never make it in the Intel arena.

Still, this is not rocket science. There should be a way to write an OS that can work in either Intel or Motorola environments - that is, assuming Apple wanted to do that.