Rumors have started to circulate since Friday, and the IT world was preparing for an earthquake: Apple to give up on IBM's PowerPCs and to go for Intel's processors.

Yesterday, the rumors were confirmed, and Apple Computer launched the bomb: the company from Cupertino will say goodbye to IBM, its longtime partner that aided him in many battles against the PC side armored with Windows and Linux, and assigned Intel as its new companion. The result of this switch will not be only a change in the processing solution, but also a new price policy.

Steve Jobs, the man who took a lot of chances and won most of the time, has announced that by 2007, all Macintosh high-end systems will switch to Intel. Analysts assess this move will cause the prices of new Apple systems to drop 10 to 20%.

Adopting Intel chips doesn't only mean a price decrease, but also an increase in computing performance, Intel's processors being thinner and easier to cool.

Still, redesigning the entire scheme of the company's systems might require some hundreds of millions of dollars, and there are a lot of risks related to this task. But Intel's roadmap encourages Steve Jobs to declare that together they will offer the most powerful solutions in the world for Apple's customers.

The company to be left behind, IBM, doesn't seem to be affected by this loss, which will probably be recovered once Microsoft and Sony start producing their consoles equipped with IBM processors.