Apple will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Sort of. They'll pay you for about 10% of the burger which will probably get you the bottom half of the bun without the juiciness of the burger soaked into it. Now if the bun was a nice kaiser roll, perhaps you could make an argument for this deal. But I'm willing to bet that you can get a lot more for your old iPod than the 10% off the purchase of a new one offered by Apple.
I'm really surprised to hear of Apple getting in bed with Intel for future chips. All I would imagine this would do is encourage Intel to slow down the releases of faster chips even more than they already do. If both Macs and PCs are run by Intel chips, what's going to drive the market. I would have liked to see Apple get behind AMD who has always been there to keep Intel in check. They do not nearly have the market share, but this will make it a little tougher to keep Intel honest.
Apple, you know, “think different”, and all that business. It would just make sense for Apple to go with AMD. The whole “Macs are faster” argument would fall by the wayside when the chips are the same, wouldn't it? If Apple's goal is to make the transition to Macs that much easier for the PC user, you know, so much easier that it doesn't seem any different, well then why would a PC user want to pay a few hundred more to get a Mac.
PC users aren't as spellbound by Steve Jobs as much as the hardcore Apple users, so before the assimilation process into PCs edges further toward completion, Apple has to think about whether they want to continue to hold their place in the computer market, or become an iPod company.
Lame animation alert.
