Apple of IBM's eye?

[Mac Reporter]

The Register reports:
By Cormac O'Reilly
Published Monday 6th December 2004 11:32*GMT

As the IT world digests the fact that IBM has, according to the New York Times, put its PC division up for sale, another set of speculation revs up.

No, not the fact that the rumored potential buyer is Chinese company Lenovo, nor the cruel related joke that many old IBMers caught in the sold PC division would quickly will appear on a Chinese take-away menu, thereby helping fix IBM's embarrassing pension funding problems.

Instead, an even better and more audacious speculation is that once publicly free of the PC division IBM will either buy, or form a close joint venture with Apple to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip.

Selling its PC Division would also pave the way for such an IBM move to be approved by the FTC. To add even more heat to already hot gossip, it turns out that Apple is not among the published list of early companies signing up for IBM's PowerPC consortia - a rather strange gap given Apple's now absolute dependency on that microprocessor range.

Well, you may ask, why would they sign up if a romance with IBM was in the air, or maybe even already consummated? And, knowing just how difficult it is to keep secrets these days, is it coincidence that some financial analysts have doubled their estimate of Apple's stock price expectation recently?
Read more.

[Edited on 12-7-2004 by Mac Reporter]

[jsaure]

I'd like to have what Cormac's smoking.

IBM and Apple cannot be more different. One's all business while the other's all play. A merger would alienate each of their respective client base, the sky will fall, hell will freeze over, and the terrorists will win.

The reason IBM's selling their PC unit is because PC product and pricing cycles have made it hard to create profit. That, aside from the hordes of competing PC vendors, has prompted IBM to call it quits.

Investors are hiking up their prospects for Apple stock mainly because of the white-hot iPod, not some speculation that IBM is suddenly gonna put on a party hat and start hawking iBooks to suits in Wall Street.

It's just hard to imagine how a primarily lifestyle company and a strictly business enterpise could merge into one focused entity. Nah, I'm just a purist that want Apple to remain Apple and not be tainted by big blue boredom.

:2cents:

[piedad]

Well, Steve Jobs is the one who used "Hell Froze Over" in his iTunes for Windows ad.
On the other hand, the overall strategy of IBM is to move towards services and away from commodity/consumer items so an Apple purchase is crazy.
Only possibility is for IBM to resell the xServer product line to its corporate clients, but that would not sit well with the company's religious push of Linux.
Go figure.

[Henjie]

IBM sells PC group to Lenovo


~Henjie