Further evidence that we've all stepped through a time warp into the heady days of late 1996: everyone and his opinionated grandmother has a surefire plan to "fix" Apple. As first pointed out by faithful viewer Sandra Odorico, the lovely folks at Salon have evidently decided that today is Twist The Knife Day, and to celebrate, they've posted a trio of articles under the cheerful heading of "Is Apple falling?" The first is mostly a navel-gazing exercise in which the author ponders the anti-revolutionary climate of the personal computer industry as a whole. The third is primarily some guy complaining about how he bought a DVI Power Mac G4 and an ADC Studio Display without reading the specs and couldn't plug one into the other, and it's all Apple's fault (when, as we all know by now, it's only mostly Apple's fault). But the middle piece, "How Apple can be fixed," is the one that really had us on the edge of our couch.

Here's the nutshell version of the author's plan: Apple should ditch the PowerPC and instead port Mac OS X to the Athlon, ship Athlon-based Macs with Windows compatibility built-in, and rely on PowerPC emulation to get existing Mac software to run. Now, we've heard this plan before, although it's generally been tossed around as a potential strategy to get Apple out of Motorola's ever-deepening Megahertz Pit; this is a slightly broader take on the same idea, which has the added benefit of making the Mac "the most universally compatible computer on the planet." What could possibly go wrong?

What, indeed. Well, for starters, how about the instantaneous genocide of Mac-specific software? If you think it's tough to find Mac software now, just imagine what would happen if suddenly every new Mac sold actually ran Windows applications faster than older Mac apps. It doesn't take a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future to see a bleak and inelegant destiny at the end of that dark path: why would any developer invest time and money in the creation of a Mac version, when the Windows version would run just fine? Cripes, if you've ever lobbied for a Mac version of Windows-only software, you may have already heard the "there are no plans for a Mac-specific version because our product works on Macs with VirtualPC" line-- we know we have. Just imagine how much worse that would get if Macs all ran Windows apps natively.

What about Mac-only developers? Well, what better time to jump ship? Rather than learning how to program Mac OS X apps in Cocoa, they'd probably learn how to write Windows software instead-- since it'd still work on Macs, while also broadening the audience for their products tenfold. Instead of just waving buh-bye to the "classic" Mac interface, we'd essentially have to say so long to Aqua as well-- since, with only Windows software to run, we'd only ever see Steve's lickable gumdrop interface in the Finder.

So what Salon's "Utopian computer" would actually turn into is a pretty Mac with a pretty operating system that gets used exclusively to run ugly applications in a separate Windows compatibility environment. Technical hurdles aside, this is a scenario that would "fix" Apple at the cost of the Macintosh itself; it wouldn't be long before Apple jettisoned Mac OS X entirely for cost reasons and just sold the best-looking Windows PCs on the market. Maybe it's just us, but we're thanking the powers that be that Steve would never let that happen. Of course, he's been kicked out before...