Ars Technica columnist Jon "Hannibal" Stokes has published his latest column, which uses some insider information to pursue the notion that Apple moved to Intel not because of performance-per-watt issues but because "the iPod and iTMS -- not the Mac -- are now driving Apple's revenues and stock price ... Apple is more concerned with scoring Intel's famous volume discounts on the Pentium and XScale lines than it is about the performance, or even the performance per watt, of the Mac."

While Apple's iPods currently use Texas Instruments' ARM chip, "we can expect to see Intel inside future versions of the iPod line," Mr. Stokes writes. Why? Because "the XScale is plenty powerful enough to do video playback, and I have reason to believe that Apple is currently working on a video iPod to counter the Sony PSP," he says. "When the video iPod hits the streets, Apple will have an iPod product that plays each of the media formats represented in its iLife suite."

The bottom line, believes Mr. Stokes, is "the cold, hard reality that the Mac is Apple's past and the iPod is Apple's future, in the same way that the PC is the industry's past and the post-PC gadget is the industry's future." While that doesn't mean, as some Ars Technica readers have interpreted it, that Apple will be exiting the computer business, it does mean that both Macs and PCs "will stick around as the hub of a growing and increasingly profitable constellation of post-PC gadgets." He even declares the iPod "the Macintosh of the new millennium."