If you follow technology news, there's a good chance you've heard that Apple has announced that they'll be switching to Intel processors in their Mac line, starting next year. This is fairly big development, and not just because of how it affects CPU manufacturers like Motorola, IBM (who makes Apple's current PowerPC CPUs), AMD, and (obviously) Intel.

One of the interesting implications of this is that, for the first time ever, Apple computers will be able to run Windows. Not through an add-in board like the Performa machine back in the 90's, and not through Virtual PC software which turns a fast Mac into a slow Windows machine. I mean simply running Windows. If you want, you'll be able to strip out Mac OS X and replace it with Windows XP.

At that point, "Macintosh" will cease to be a separate platform from the rest of the desktop-computing industry. Macs will be "PC compatible", and Apple will be just another brand of PC.

Of course the key difference is that only Apples will be able to run Mac OS X. Apple has promised to make it impossible to do this on anybody else's PCs (though it remains to be seen how successful they'll be at that). OS X is a really great operating system, so I don't expect much of anybody who buys an Apple will really erase OS X and replacing it with Windows. But some of them might still replace it with Linux. In fact, some already do; there's a version of Linux engineered specifically to run on Macs.

But whether or not OS X gets hacked to run on Dells or HPs, this will point out to consumers that: PC ≠ Windows. People (even technical people who should know better) refer to the "PC version" of a program such as Photoshop, when they really mean the "Windows version". That's an important distinction, because there are PCs out there that don't run Windows. More than a few of them, in fact. Most of them run Linux, a smaller number run FreeBSD or one of its cousins, a few run BeOS, and so on. I have a bunch of PCs on my network; only two of them run Windows-compatible application software.

I can see a lot of future Apple owners installing both Windows and OS X on their Intel-powered Macs, and selecting which OS to run depending on whether they want to surf the web safely or do video editing (OS X), or play games or run some specialised shareware app (Windows). Owners of Dell or HP PCs might respond by installing both Windows and... Linux (second cousin of OS X, with similar anti-spyware/virus advantages), or a revitalized BeOS (a great multimedia OS that Microsoft conspired to keep locked out of the market).

The bottom line may be that people stop thinking that buying a PC necessarily means using Windows. And that can only be good for the technology industry, by poking a hole in the Microsoft near-monopoly and perhaps even restoring competition to the software market.