Well, it Osborned me
Since Paul Hoffman (and the trail behind him) says Apple switching to Intel chips won’t Osborne them, I have to assume it won’t, for the core, existing Mac users. Me, I’m putting my plans to switch when this laptop craps out on hold. Maybe next time.
It won’t Osborne them in the sense that they won’t go bankrupt. Of course, they will take a dramatic hit in sales, but unlike Osborne they have the cash to ship Intel Macs before even getting near to bankrupcy. It’s going to be a tough year, but I have no doubt that Apple know what it takes.
Same here, Phil.
I’ve been thinking about this, and think that unless you are looking for IA-specific compatibility features — such as dual-booting Longhorn — there’s not much to prevent you from buying the current crop. The fat bins will keep software issues to a minimum, much as they did with the M68K to PowerPC transition.
In fact, we may find that some units will remain POWERed. Or not. It doesn’t really matter, unless you think IBM makes a better chip.
You’re probably right: I can barely guess about value and importance of CPU on Wintel, much less Mac.
But since the wallet’s in my pocket, I don’t have anyone else to decide whether or not to pull it out, and the Mac range just doesn’t feel right. I like desktop-replacement laptops, and if I buy a Mac, it’s going to be at least partly for building Firefox (even though there are now quite a few more people hacking it on Macs than there were when I first started thinking about it). Somehow, the difference between a midrange Powerbook and a midrange Power Mac (1.5GHz G4 and dual 2GHz G5s) feels a whole lot wider than the comparable Wintel difference. Maybe a more reasonable comparison is to a midrange iMac with a single 2GHz G5, I dunno, and I dunno how big a difference that really is, and I dunno how long it would take Firefox to build on a 1.5GHz G4, and I dunno how else the relatively slow and old CPU would affect me. But I do know how much Wintel I need to not be annoyed by it, and I do know I don’t want to move off the couch to a desktop, so if I break any more essential bits off this laptop any time soon, I can either buy a Mac that feels like it might be disappointingly underpowered, knowing that sometime in the near future they’ll be selling something that might not be underpowered, or I can just stick with what I know and not embark on the adventure of unlearning 18 years of habits. (Well, okay, since my boss had our only copy of Windows 2.0 on his office 386, that I rarely got to touch, I have more Mac OS 1 habits from then than Windows habits. Still.)
Good points, Phil. It should cause you to wait a bit if there will be some specific features that the new boxes will have that the current ones cannot, like usable Windows emulation. But I suspect that few users have those needs.
If you need to buy a new box now and you wanted to switch but aren’t because the new Apple boxes are about a year away, are you going to buy a new two-year box or a cheap one-year box? I strongly suspect that most of the non-switching is going to be delayed, not lost, sales.