Building a Mac seems like a crazy enough idea. Throw in Intel hardware and the men in white suits should be rounding the corner. Yet the unfortunate leak of an early developer build let anyone do just that—anyone willing to risk the wrath of Apple's famous lawyers, that is. We risk it for you, and weigh the new platform's pros and cons.

UPDATE: Intel iBooks in January.

UPDATE: In e-mail discussing the feasibility of hardware-based security solutions, Peter writes:

I don't think the major motivation here is piracy-- or DRM, for that matter.
It's about keeping customer data secure, which is much more valuable to the
PC market today.

FileVault is my favorite feature of Mac OS X because it gives me a high
degree of confidence that my data will not fall into the wrong hands if my
PowerBook is lost or stolen. But if someone gains access to my machine while
it's running, by exploiting some security hole or just by turning on file
sharing when I'm not watching, FileVault can't help.

Any process on my machine can access most of my data, and by logging
keystrokes and exploiting relatively minor vulnerabilities, my PowerBook can
become an open book. That makes me nervous.

Imagine how much worse it must be for CIOs at hospitals and law firms, where
customer data are protected by law. Or at high-tech companies, where source
code and chip design databases are worth literally billions of dollars.

Microsoft isn't going to have strong server security before 2008 (my guess)
and client security will likely take a few years longer; Windows legacy
software issues are very difficult to deal with. Apple could make strong
security a basic feature of the x86 transition, or perhaps the x86-64
transition that will follow shortly after.

If Apple can stake out a position as the only PC vendor with strong security
across its whole product line-- even if this advantage lasts just two
years-- it could take over a large part of the enterprise computing market.

Apple could have done all this stuff itself, but it's cheaper to let Intel
develop the necessary hardware in parallel with the software effort at
Apple. Whether this is actually what's going on, I have no idea, but I know
some of the people who do this sort of strategic planning over there, and
I'm sure they haven't missed the potential opportunity to pick up 20% of the
PC market in the next four years...

That would be quite a coup. First .Mac becomes infrastructural reality before anyone gets anywhere with .NET; then Tiger beats Longhorn/WinFS to the punch and DB-query-style searching will be old news by the time Windows gets it. For their next trick, Apple could out-Palladium Palladium...