"There are a number of entities that appear to be convinced that M$ is a Monopoly." First, that's not at issue. It's been proven in court that Microsoft IS a Monopoly; and anyone with any knowledge at all of the market has to agree. It's simply common sense. There's nothing inherently illegal about BEING a Monopoly; but it's also been proven in court that Microsoft has ILLEGALLY used its Monopoly power to advance its own fortunes at the expense of others. The only problem is that they hold so much political power that the government isn't willing to stop them. The Mac represents a big profit center for Microsoft. They realised that sales were slipping because Microsoft products for the Mac had become trivial ports of the Windows versions; and that's simply unacceptable in the Mac market where usability and interface elegance are far more important. So they created an entire Mac product group to focus on developing Microsoft technologies into Mac native products that are equal to (and by many reports sometimes better than) the Windows versions. That's just not the behavior of someone who'd like to abandon a market, so you can forget about that story. If they were supporting the Mac under duress, or didn't believe they were recouping their investment, you can be certain a business savvy company like Microsoft would be, at best, continuing to ship cheap Windows knockoff ports. This is all just basic business -- it's got nothing to do with platform religion. Apple might do something that violated common business sense, but it's highly unlikely that Microsoft ever would; their entire company has been based on business and nothing but. Besides, Chimera is a better web browser, and OpenOffice.org is a far better office environment. The "need" for Microsoft is smoke and mirrors. Losing the Mac market won't hurt Microsoft much -- but ultimately losing Microsoft won't hurt Apple much, either. In the meantime, the "uneasy peace" is good for both of them, and they know it. Apple sure does need a faster machine -- but the ones out are plenty fast for nearly any application; and the next move is up to Motorola -- or perhaps IBM, which has shown much more commitment to the PowerPC. (And PowerPC is a far better architecture than than X86 or even IPF... the problems have been in chip production technology.) The latest Apple machines do DDR RAM -- but are hamstrung by the PowerPC chip interfaces to far less throughput than that should represent. New versions of G4 will solve the problem. It's amazing how anytime someone says the word "Macintosh" hordes of Wintel people charge to the attack. Feeling defensive? If not, just leave it alone, OK? You're not going to convince anyone, and you're just making yourselves look silly.