Apple switching to Intel
Let me make this official: you haven’t read about this story on this blog because (i) you will have heard it from about 5,000 other sources, and (ii) I don’t give a damn. That’s right — I don’t care what kind of CPU sits in my little Mac as long as it gets the job done.
Apple “selling out” to the Wintel duopoly? C’mon, IBM –the supplier of the PowerPC chips — is hardly an underdog or iconoclast in the business, right? Hasn’t stopped Apple from building beautiful Macs and beautiful OSs and beautiful applications (and a few less beautiful ones, like the last iterations of AppleWorks), and Intel won’t stop it from doing the same for years to come.
Calm down, relax, move on.
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T K Vogel | 6:04 pm |
Umh and what about me, simple mac user, who was planning to buy a new powerbook this summer? I don’t know what to do now, cause I know that my little g3 will not last another year of work, while I don’t feel to buy a new computer which will be overpassed in one year. I guess I’ll look for some used one.
Comment by Cicciosax — June 8, 2005 @ 6:44 pm
Fair enough. But consider this: Apple will start using the Intel chips in low-end units (the Mini, maybe the eMac, iMac) by June 2006 and gradually introduce them in all Macs during 2007. So the introduction is still a year away, and that’s only for some units. Having said that, I *would* expect to see an Intel-based PowerBook fairly early on since the inability of IBM to produce a G5 chip that’s appropriate for mobile computing was probably one of the reasons for the switch. So, yes, we might see a new PB as early as in a year’s time, but I certainly wouldn’t let that stop me from buying an “old” PB now — they’re terrific machines and very, very mature. (I have a first-generation Titanium and a first-generation 17″ Aluminum Book and they’re both great, but suffer from some of the little glitches you see in first-generation products. But rest assured, even after a full 4 and 2 years, respectively, these are both still great machines that do everything I want them to do, except writing my PhD for me.)
Depending on your budget and your needs, you could also buy a cheap iBook to tie you over for a year or two until you get the latest, Intel-based PowerBook, but the truth is that the current PBs won’t become “obsolete” in any important sense for several years. They will still be able to run the latest OS and apps and all that.
That’s of course just my personal opinion.
By the way, there’s a pretty good rundown of what it all means right here:
http://www.macworld.com/2005/06/features/intelfaq/index.php
Comment by Administrator — June 8, 2005 @ 8:32 pm