Question: now that the 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 is allegedly shipping, well ahead of its official launch date, how much longer do you suppose Apple will wait for Motorola to close the PowerPC-x86 clock speed gap before the company jumps ship completely? Answer: well, what time is it now? Ha ha ha! Oh, we just slay us! But seriously, folks, if you're really wondering when Uncle Steve may throw the switch and mandate a mass Mac migration to x86-based chips, a watch may not be the most appropriate instrument to use-- try a calendar instead. And we don't mean next year's.

What we're getting at, people, is that despite Steve's scripted earnings report assurance that Apple was "working with Motorola" to get clock speeds higher (by which we assume that Motorola was working on the actual clock speeds, while Apple fueled the effort with a healthy combination of blackmail and threats of physical violence), rumor has it that Apple's been working on an exit strategy for months now. You've all heard the "Mac OS X on Intel" rumors before, and with good reason: since Mac OS X is based heavily on NeXTSTEP, and NeXTSTEP already ran on Intel, there's no particular reason to doubt that Apple has continued to keep x86-compatible builds current in its top secret underground bunkers.

Well, faithful viewer Mike Norris has another gallon of gas to throw on the fire. He pointed us towards an interesting tidbit over at Ars Technica, in which the author claims that a programmer friend of his was recently aggressively recruited by Apple as manpower for the Mac OS X on Intel project. And this time we're not talking about a half-hearted port of only the core OS, either-- "he claims they're porting the whole thing, Aqua and all, to x86, and that they're in the process right now of hiring people to do so." Gadzooks! If that's true, then it sounds like it might be more than just a "break glass in case of emergency" backup plan to be used on the off-chance that Motorola is swallowed up into the bowels of the planet or something. It's starting to sound like the wheels of an x86 shift are already in motion. Will future Macs have Intel Inside?

Sure, it'd be a monstrous effort to get an entire community of Mac users (not to mention the developers) to switch to a new and completely binary-incompatible chipset, but hey, Apple did it before with the PowerPC. As Ars Technica points out, a 2 GHz Pentium 4 (which The Register now claims may ship as early as January) might well run PowerPC software at an acceptable speed purely in emulation. Technically, while it'd be a bit of a wrench, it's not inconceivable for Apple to throw the PowerPC out the window and snuggle up to the long-despised Pentium instead.

Here's why we doubt it'll happen: can you imagine a Pentium 4-based Cube? Fanless our Aunt Fanny-- the thing would have to be almost all fan to keep the thing from burning a hole straight through the desk on which it sits. Besides that, if the Pentium IIIs we've seen are any indication, we wouldn't be surprised if a Pentium 4 didn't even physically fit in an eight-inch Cube, what with being the size of a Buick or whatever. Megahertz gap, shmegahertz gap; unless he absolutely has to, Steve's not about to ditch style and elegance for clock speed any more than he's likely to take public speaking lessons from Bill Gates. But if you believe Ars Technica's story, the fact that Apple's keeping a Plan B simmering on the back burner speaks volumes about the company's confidence-- lack thereof-- in Motorola's ability to close the gap. And if Intel's too bitter to swallow, there's always AMD...