The Apple Blog: Spy shots show OS X without the "Mac" could clones return?

Nick Mediati speculates the the lack of the "Mac" branding in front of "OS X Leopard" means that Apple is going to let other computer makers put Leopard on their systems.

Wow.

When I said "Perhaps there are some more systems on the way that will run Leopard that won't be called Macs?" in my last post, I meant new systems/form-factors from Apple (like a tablet or ultra-portable), not systems from others.

MacRumors says the "no new features" part of the rumour for 10.6 "Snow Leopard" is because the difference between 10.5 and 10.6 is being Mac only or not... ie: 10.6 will be PC compatible, 10.5 isn't (it requires a Mac).

Let me add one more big piece of kindling to this fire that connects the dots big-time.

Snow is white. Back in the NeXT/OpenStep days, OpenStep ran on NeXT hardware, PC hardware, Sun hardware, and HP hardware. NeXT boxes were called black boxes, and Intel PCs were called white boxes. Thus, associating the Intel PC-compatible version of OS X with the colour white makes perfect sense, put into that historical context.

Does Apple think Microsoft is so weak right now because of the failure of Vista that now is the time to pounce on the PC market and absolutely kill Windows?

Does this mean Apple will be allowing Dell and Sony and HP pre-install Snow Leopard on compatible systems, or does it mean it's going to be sitting next to XP and Vista on the shelf and anyone is can take it home and try to install it?

Will Apple stick with a BootCamp-like solution for dual booting back into Windows, or will they bundle a Parallels/VMWare-like package to let users run Windows simultaneously?

Man, of all the WWDCs to decide to skip, this could turn out to be the biggest WWDC since '05 when the Intel bomb was dropped... I think this would be even bigger.

Wow. And it was only Tuesday when I told a friend of mine the story of when Apple killed the cloners when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, and then killed Rhapsody/Intel and YellowBox/NT, and that's why I didn't think his belief Apple was about to ship Cocoa for Windows would happen. We weren't thinking big enough... it's not about Cocoa this time, it's about the whole she-bang!