BusinessWeek Ponders Silverthorne as the Future of Mobile Apple

BusinessWeek has a convincing article that points to Intel's Silverthorne being at the center of Apple's mobile future, both for the iPhone and perhaps a new class of notebooks.

"Although the tiny Silverthorne is not as powerful as Intel's top-of-the-line Core2 or Core2 Duo, it will support the x86 instruction set that makes a PC chip a PC chip. That's especially noteworthy in terms of the iPhone. Right now, the main chip inside the iPhone comes not from Intel, but from Samsung. And the Samsung chip is not an x86 chip, but one based on a core from Britain's ARM Holdings (ARMHY).

The possibility of squeezing an x86 chip like Silverthorne inside a future iPhone would make adapting software from a future Mac computer for Apple's handheld substantially easier. (This assumes that Apple makes good on its promise to make the iPhone software development process easy and open.) Suddenly, the iPhone would be capable of running pretty much any Mac software with few, if any, programming changes."

This conjecture along with Apple's recent patent application for a docking station for a ultramobile computer hints toward the notebook as a "pod" of your digital life as opposed to the centerpiece. The combination of new technology in mobile chips and synching allows for very lightweight yet powerful mobile computers, which will allow for full access to the power of the Internet and also a select (yet still large) amount of data from a user's digital life. These computers will finally have battery life that maintains the computer's usefulness, a synching process that is relatively painless (as it is with the iPhone), and a light weight and size that is truly portable . My MacBook weighs around 5 pounds and I have come to hate the idea of taking it on the go. But if there was a notebook that only weighed a pound, I would gladly stuff it into my bag every day and take it to work, even if I had no plans to use it.