We had a fantastically well done April Fools joke played on the 100k or so Intel employees today.

Everyone in the company received an email stating that there was a major new deal between Apple and Intel, and that executives would host a webcast to announce it today at 8:30AM Pacific. The webcast has been replaying every half hour since then. Very little details have been posted about the content of the announcement, and the article on our internal web site states that the announcement will be made public to the stock market tomorrow (Friday March 31st).

I missed the original webcast (conflicting meeting), but caught it later in the day. Keep in mind this is an April Fools joke…but the executives announced a merger between Intel and Apple. They demonstrated the new name (mactel), the new logo, new tag line (leap different), and talked about transition plans, and why they decided to merge. By the time they got to uniforms (black turtleneck) and Intel, wait, sorry - mactel values of “Be Cool”, it was pretty obvious it was a joke.

Intel does a great job with April fools every year. Normally they turn our internal website into a huge pile of fake news, interviews, etc. This year, April 1st lands on a Saturday, so they thought they’d get us all a little early. Since it wasn’t the standard fake news that we’ve now become accustomed to, it was extremely effective. We may be a big company, but we do have fun every once in a while.

I still hope they do the fake news…it may even be worth logging into work on Saturday just to read it. ;-)

Disclaimer: The content of this message is my personal opinion only and although I am an employee of Intel, the statements I make here in no way represent Intel’s position on the issue, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of Intel on this matter.