Woo-hoo, SMACK TALK!! And here we thought this whole week would be a full-on snoozer, when MacMinute comes to the rescue with a link to an interview in the Edmonton Journal. An interview with whom, you ask (being the sticklers for grammar that you are)? An interview with Pat "Call Me 'Borg'" Gelsinger, Intel's senior veep and chief technology officer, we answer. And normally we'd find an interview with some Intel dweeb about as interesting as an extensive treatise on the subtle art of fish stick arrangement, but this time we were lucky enough for him to have badmouthed Steve Jobs. Thank heavens. Seriously, you don't know how close we were to trying to write something about the Irish iPod shortage. Dodged a bullet there.

So here's the scoop: following all sorts of stunningly interesting insights about how "there is no longer any innovation ahead of us" (well, maybe not from your company, bubelah), how "we have to make technology more transparent and visible" (does anyone else see a problem with that?), and how "if technology can do it we will embrace it, even if it means eating our own children" (ladies and gentlemen, we have an admission of familial cannibalism here!), Pat goes for the smackdown: "I think Steve Jobs has made the wrong CPU choice for 20 years, he just added a few more years to the life of his bad decisions." Mmmm, do we taste fear, everybody? When asked what Intel chips have to offer for Apple, Pat ever-so-eloquently replies, "Our chips would help Apple could find ways to open up more applications for themselves." (Apparently the editor was using a Wintel or something.)

Now, despite the sheer stupidity of publicly stating that the Almighty Steve has been making wrong decisions for 20 years (a move that will surely culminate in Pat's "accidental" demise when an unidentified Gulfstream Jet rains a payload of flaming 286s on top of him as he snoozes in his backyard hammock one day), we have to admit that Pat may have a valid point. Looking back, even if the PowerPC had consistently trumped Intel's offerings, Apple may possibly have benefited more by using the same processors as the rest of the industry; at the very least Macs would always have maintained raw performance parity with the Wintels against which it competed, and then it could have won on basis of the overall user experience. The switch from the 680x0 to the PowerPC would have been a reasonable time to switch to x86 instead, since all legacy code had to run in emulation anyway. Today we wouldn't have spent the last five years moaning about Intel's performance lead (real or imagined), and persuading Wintel users to switch would be much easier, since running Windows applications on an x86 Mac with little to no speed hit would be cake. (Whether or not such a thing might have torpedoed the Mac software industry is a whole 'nother kettle of creamed corn.)

We're not saying that the man's right (we value our living, breathing, flaming-286less existence), but it does make for an interesting "What if?" scenario. Of course, hindsight's 20-20, and if Apple were stuck with Intel today we'd be looking at a freakin' Itanium for 64-bit performance, which is a frightening enough thought to keep us screaming well into next year, so personally we're plenty happy with the PowerPC architecture, thank you very much. Oh, and Pat-- when you die, can we have your stereo?