Last June, Apple Computer announced that future versions of their Macintosh computers would be based on CPU chips from monopolist Intel. At the time, I said this:

In the past year or so, Macintosh sales seemed to be inching up. Now, sales of existing Macs are going to crater. The new machines won’t ship until about the time that Microsoft’s continually-postponed Longhorn operating system does. The first Macintels will ship in about a year. The entire line won’t be converted for two and a half years. During that time, nobody will want to buy machines that Apple has already abandoned.

Apparently I was wrong:

Mr. Jobs also revealed that Apple’s revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 31 jumped 63 percent, to $5.7 billion. The figure easily beat Wall Street’s expectations, as sales of the iPod portable music player more than tripled compared with the holiday quarter in 2004. Revenue for that quarter was $3.5 billion.

Mr. Jobs said the company sold 14 million iPods during the holiday quarter, up from 4.5 million during the 2004 holiday season. Perhaps more surprising was the news that Apple sold 1.25 million Macintosh computers in the quarter, up from 1.05 million in 2004, despite the worries of some analysts that consumers would delay their purchases. Sales at Apple’s retail stores rose to about $1 billion, Mr. Jobs said.

This week, Apple introduced their first Intel-based Macs, almost six months before the predictions made last year. They said that the transition would be completed by the end of this year, about a year before last year’s predictions.

Unlike the prototype machines Apple supplied to software developers last June, the new Macs won’t run any currently shipping version of Microsoft Windows, so visions of running Windows and Macintosh software on the same machine are on hold. Longhorn, the forthcoming version of Windows, has been renamed Vista. It’s expected by the end of this year, and may be able to run on the new machines.

I still don’t want one of the new machines. Intel has built DRM capabilities into many of their chips, and I’m still concerned that Apple made the switch to take advantage of those capabilities.

The point of the microcomputer revolution that started in the 1970s was that ordinary people could have complete control of computer power that had previously been available only to governments and big corporations. Once that revolution was well entrenched, Microsoft and other software vendors started trying to take that control back, with things like product activation, active updates and “digital rights management” (DRM) everywhere. Apple has always been an oasis from these anti-customer efforts. However, one apparent reason for Apple’s move to Intel now is that Intel is building DRM capabilities into their CPUs, helping ensure that, although you may have paid for the computer, someone else will control what you can do with it.

I believe it may be a year or two before we know whether Apple intends to limit users’ control over their own computers. Hard as it is to believe, I’ve been wrong before. I’d be delighted to be proved wrong once more.