Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

IBM, Intel and Apple declined to comment for this story.

“I don’t know that Apple’s market share can survive another architecture shift.

Every time they do this, they lose more customers” and more software partners, he said.

(Motorola spinoff Freescale currently makes PowerPC processors for Apple notebooks and the Mac Mini.)

And Jobs has saidMac OS X could easily run on x86 chips.

The move also raises questions about Apple’s future computer strategy.

The chips show up in everything from networking equipment to IBM servers to themost powerful supercomputer, Blue Gene/L.

Those numbers do not include PowerPC processors.

However, Apple has roughly 1.8 percent of the worldwide PC market, he added.

CNET News.com’s Michael Kanellos and Richard Shim contributed to this report.