See if you can follow this one. Robert X. Cringely is a pundit, so take that with a grain of salt. But I’ve been pondering why Steve Jobs trashed the Cell processor and I think he hit it on the head. It’s not about getting built-in DRM to appease the studios, it’s about major, twisted, ugly business. So see if you can follow this wild ride:

“The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap, and nothing that IBM couldn’t have matched. If Apple was willing to consider a processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD, so I simply have to conclude that technology has nothing at all to do with this decision. This is simply about business — BIG business.

“Another clue comes from HP, where a rumor is going around that HP selling iPods could turn into HP becoming an Apple hardware partner for personal computers, too.

“Microsoft comes into this because Intel hates Microsoft. It hasn’t always been that way, but in recent years Microsoft has abused its relationship with Intel and used AMD as a cudgel against Intel. Even worse, from Intel’s standpoint Microsoft doesn’t work hard enough to challenge its hardware. For Intel to keep growing, people have to replace their PCs more often and Microsoft’s bloatware strategy just isn’t making that happen, especially if they keep delaying Longhorn.” More….