Dell and Apple, sittin in a tree?

Joe Wilcox at Jupiter Media has an interesting write up on the rampant speculation flowing through the industry about any future Dell-Apple partnership to ship OSX on Dell boxes (spurred byMichael Dell’s comments to Fortune).

If it happened, it would be a nuclear bombshell in the PC industry, in my uneducated and purely personal opinion. The move alone would probably blow open the doors to ISV’s porting to support OSX, and things could become very interesting very fast.

But as Joe notes, Apple is about style above all else. I can’t ever see them surrendering control of the physical user experience – the touch of the box case, the colors and lighting, the sleekness of the SuperDrive, etc. They tried letting others build Macs once back in the day, and pulled back fast.

Still, it makes for a lot of fun speculation. :)