A report by Don Clark and Nick Wringfield in Monday's WSJ confirms that Apple's move will begin next year, starting with the Mini.

WSJ seems oblivious to the existence of QuickTransit [1, 2] or sufficiently skeptical of Transitive's claims to not bother mentioning it in their report, despite referring specifically to emulation in the context of the shift from 68k to PPC.

WSJ lends some credence to the theory about a collective decision to let Jobs speak for everyone on this latest move. They say that Apple has already briefed their plans to IBM, Microsoft, and other software companies. It is being made to look like an Apple NDA is in effect, but it's more likely a mutual agreement, at least between Apple and Intel.

WSJ suggests that Intel will subsidize Apple's use of Pentium processors through the transition period. Perhaps the subsidies will help Apple cover the licensing costs to Transitive, and Apple notebooks will get faster without getting more expensive.

This whole story is especially interesting for what it isn't saying about AMD, who may increasingly come to dominate the no-margin "value PC" market even as the traditional PC platform fades into history. Today's industry realignment leaves them looking like a fifth wheel -- in the West, anyway. But if Lenovo and AMD can deliver on the promise of $100 laptops for the developing world, they might be able to stake out an early claim on a major international growth market.

[1] "Transitive expects to announce that a second computer OEM [after SGI] will deploy products enabled by its technology during the 1st half of 2005 and that others will deploy QuickTransit before the end of the year. Unfortunately, strict confidentiality obligations prevent us from discussing these relationships in any detail."

[2] "Alasdair Rawsthorne, founder/CTO, and Bob Wiederhold, CEO, were perfectly silent when asked why, given the vast installed base of Sparc and PA-RISC iron and disgruntled users on those boxes, Transitive would work on the IBM Power platform first. This may be because IBM approached Transitive first to encourage them to do this, which seems unlikely unless you think about how IBM might want to port mainframe applications to future Power6 servers. Maybe this is how IBM will do it--if it consolidates the mainframe onto the Power platform at all."