And what will the next generation of desktop computers look like? A lot like Apple's new iMac. "The iMac embodies a lot of the things I'm talking about," says Grove. "Sometimes what Apple is doing may have an electrifying effect on the rest of us. It's nothing we couldn't have done, but Apple went ahead and did it." Apple's iMac, it should be noted, is built around processors made by Motorola, not Intel. And Grove is not entirely uncritical of the translucent blue box; like millions of die-hard Mac fans, he wonders about the lack of a floppy disk drive. "I would not have made that choice," says TIME's 1997 Man of the Year.
Andy Grove Loves His iMac
NEW YORK: Intel chairman Andy Grove, codeveloper with Microsoft's Bill
Gates of the industry standard "Wintel" PC, has seen the future of
computing and it is... a Macintosh. In an exclusive interview Wednesday,
Grove told TIME Daily that the industry is entering what he calls "the
Valley of Death," a destructive period of time in which "the players will
change, the technology will change, and the devices will change." What
started as general-purpose computers with networking capability added
almost as an afterthought, he said, will metamorphosize into network machines
that also do computing.