Apple began its historic move to Intel Tuesday when it started selling its first Intel box, an iMac desktop fitted with Intel's mobile 65nm Yonah chip, the new 32-bit Core Duo, and priced, reasonably enough by Apple's lights, at $1,299 for a 1.8GHz chip and a 17-inch display or $1,699 for a 2GHz chip and a 20-inch display.

Apple also announced its first Intel laptop, the Yonah-based MacBook Pro, which hits market next month priced at either $1,999 or $2,499 depending on whether it's got a 1.6GHz chip or the 1.8GHz chip.

According to chip expert Nathan Brookwood, Apple has taken precautions that folks entranced with its industrial design won't buy its boxes, strip off its proprietary Unix operating system and run Windows. He says Intel's new best friend has embraced Intel's newfangled BIOS-replacing PowerPC-like Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), which means that the Intel version of the Mac operating system won't run on anybody's Intel boxes but Apple's.

Leopard, the next-generation Mac operating system, the follow-on to the current day Tiger, is due out in late '06, early '07, around the time Microsoft's Vista's supposed to be ready. And Apple is ahead of Microsoft in software-as-a-service with its million-member hundred-bucks-a-year .Mac program, which now includes iWeb, a bundle of web page-building movie and photo editing/storing applications.

The iMac and the MacBook are only the first wave. Apple watchers say it should add a Merom-based laptop in Q3 - that's the 64-bit version of the dual-core Yonah - as well as a 64-bit Conroe-based desktop.