John C. Dvorak has made a career out of posing novel hypotheses and occasionally surprising everyone (including, one supposes, himself) by striking gold with an accurate one. This time Dvorak says he's convinced that Apple is going to ditch its much-loved Mac OS X and switch to Windows for its shiny machines. He puts together a bit of evidence here and there, most especially Apple's recent Intel switch, and argues that Apple has said all along that it's a hardware company and that it has seen the error in trying to maintain its own OS. Dvorak postulates that since it's OS X's slick GUI that makes the Mac distinctive, Apple could "preserve its slick cachet" by grafting an "executive software layer" on top of Windows to make it feel more Mac-like. As Dvorak points out, the real trouble would be keeping the cult of Mac from rioting, but while he thinks Jobs could smooth out any dissent among the Mac-faithful, I'm not so optimistic.

So, what do you think? Is Dvorak talking crazy talk, or is he really on to something (or is there something altogether more sinister going on here)?