After Mac the Knife had hinted at such a thing a few weeks ago, we mentioned that certain Wintel manufacturers are reportedly planning to hawk their wares at next month's MacWorld Expo, in hopes of pulling Mac users over to the Dark Side of the Force. At the time, we questioned the wisdom (though not the bravery) of any Wintel company willing to brave the staunch and often fanatical devotion of Mac users gathered en masse on their own home turf. The Knife didn't name names, but MacWEEK now has more info, and the scene shouldn't be as bloody as once presaged.

Of the two PC makers who will attend the Expo, Intergraph Computer Systems is the lesser-known. They will be showing their ExtremeZ line of 300 MHz Pentium II workstations, optimized for graphics work in a prepress environment, though they are not being sold as replacements for Macs, per se. These systems are being touted as MacFriendly (!), with AppleTalk capability and other built-in utilities to allow the systems to "integrate" into a Mac-standardized situation. We find it amusing that in the Bizarro world of graphics and prepress, it's the Wintel systems that have to offer easy integration... ;-)

The bigger fish in this pond is Digital, who isn't even going to have a booth. Instead, they are launching their sneak attack by displaying their NT-based workstations in other companies' booths, and by directing "interested users" to a nearby hotel suite. Digital may be leaping feet-first into the Mac-dominated graphics world, but they're too smart to alienate potential converts with a large dog and pony show. And by targeting Apple's core market after giving up their Alpha chip to Intel, we're starting to think that Digital may become the biggest thorn in Apple's side. Keep an eye on them.

Apple, on the other hand, has to try to stem the tide of defection to NT systems in the graphics world. Way back in August, Steve Jobs identified content creation as one of the Mac's two strongholds, and pledged that Apple would so everything it could to strengthen its advantage there. Well, it's more than four months later, and we're still waiting for a concrete implementation of that pledge. If Intergraph and Digital are providing NT systems tuned for graphics and bundled with applications, where are the Macs that do the same?