Gartner: Apple should license the mac to Dell?

Garnter has a nice report entitled Apple Should License the Mac to Dell out. I'm not surprised to see this suggestion, but it's dead wrong. I'll happily confess my spotty Apple's prediction record (remind me to show you my past position, "Why Apple won't switch to Intel..." sometime), but I think this one is pretty farfetched. Some reasons:

• Apple isn't a partnership/platform company. They've never been good a partnerships, and don't really know how to do it very well. This hasn't hurt them on the iPod, but it's just not in their DNA, and it's not where they add value in a marketplace. Indeed the main point of differentation for the Mac is that it's an end-to-end play, running Mac OS, iLife, all Apple hardware, plugging in your iPod, etc... Ok, overstated - you probably also run Microsoft Office and plug in an HP printer, but you get the point.
• Apple doesn't want the headaches of supporting the universe of intel/pc hardware. Dell customers expect to be able to customize and swap out parts. You really, truly have no idea how much work it is to work with Acme videocards, and Foobar sound cards and Randomcorp motherboards. Really. Windows can do it because it has amazingly massive scale and, as the leader, foobarcorp, Acme, and Randomcorp all do a lot of the work for us. Apple would (at least for a while) have to do it all themselves.
• Apple may not need OEMs to achieve share gains. Yesterday's earnings at least imply they're doing nicely on their own.
• It's hard to get the hardware monkey off of your back. When apple sells the average mac for $1400, they make 40% profit or $560. Last quarter they sold 1.61M macs, for a total profit of $902M. If they instead sold Mac OS to dell for $25, they'd need 22x the volumes, or 36M macs per quarter. Not bloody likely.

I'm certain Apple thinks about this a lot, and they must talk to Dell and HP occasionally. But in this case, Jobs was right in 1997 when he shot software licensing in the head, just like he was wrong to do so in 1985 (when he had the opportunity to be the leader).