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.

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.