At first it seemed like a huge rumour that “leaked” a few days before the conference to generate some hype for it. Certainly no one was talking about it before CNet leaked the story, but for the next 3-4 days that’s all everyone talked about.

I was so intrigued about it happening I wandered into my office about 4am (keynote started at 3am local time here) to see if it was true. It was.

Overall I think it will be a great thing for Apple to do. Finally OSX will compete on level playing field with Windows machines. Yes Apple is a hardware company first – they make their money on selling boxes rather than copies of OSX (although the paid upgrade cycle doesn’t seem to hurt them).

But now they can sell the magic of OSX and the whole Apple experience without the burden of having to prove that a 1.5Ghz PPC is the same as a 2.5 Pentium 4.

In a one on one duel between Windows XP and Apple OSX – Windows is in all sorts of trouble.