Y'know, it would have been awesome had Apple gone with this company and they had 7W dualcore 2GHz chips in laptops at the begining of 2006, or something totally revolutionary in early 2007. There was something to be said about the feeling, from a totally non-logical standpoint, of running something different, with the potential to leapfrog everybody else stuck on x86.
But face it, I'm typing this on a 2.16GHz dualcore chip in a laptop RIGHT NOW, and it cost slightly less than a comperably equipped machine from Dell (and I can now confidently say "comperably equipped", because it uses roughly the same components).
Furthermore, Intel is a massive company, with a massive userbase, and in case nobody has noticed, THERE AREN'T ANY CHIP SHORTAGES. I ordered a popular, top of the line Mac a week after announcement, and it shipped right on schedule 5 days later, within a day of the machines that were ordered the second they were announced, EXACTLY WHEN APPLE SAID THEY WOULD START SHIPPING.
I stil remember waiting over a month for my first-gen G5. I also remember IBM saying that they'd have 3GHz in a year, which they STILL didn't 2 years on.
Now, it's not that Intel didn't have problems with their marketing-driven, MHz-over-performance-and-everything-else P4 monstrosity, but then if that were to happen again we would be stuck in exactly the same position as every other PC manufacturer, and so instead of looking stupid, Apple just looks like everybody else.
PLUS, thanks to AMD, Apple also has the option of bailing on Intel and going with another supplier if that becomes necessary--there is, admittedly, Freescale, IBM, and this new startup in the PPC arena, but none of those companies are focused on the desktop/portable chip market with their architecutres, unlike both AMD and Intel, and none of them would sell even a fraction of the chips to Apple that AMD and Intel already sell to other manufacturers, guaranteeing future development.
Now for a quick reality check about Intel's Core architecture:
I spent some time looking through a PC benchmark site's chip roundup. The 2.16GHz Core Duo--which is available in quantity right now--generally performs somewhat better than a top-of-the-line 3.75GHz P4 Extreme Edition or whatever they're called. It also performs almost as well as, if not better than, every laptop chip on the market, and is only a little behind AMD's high-end stuff. It's not 64 bit, of course, but it even performs (on desktop-oriented stuff, admittedly) roughly in line with an equivalently clocked Opteron.
Fundamentally, the Core architecture looks VERY promising, and we haven't even gotten to the high-end desktop/server versions of it yet. Which is why Apple hasn't replaced the G5 in the towers--non-universal pro app issues aside, the G5 is still competitive so far.
It's funny, because if you look at the P4-line of x86, it is a craptacular architecture, and PPC, even in it's current state, is more promising. But there's more to Intel's x86 than the P4, and Core has demonstrated that. Basically, Apple switched just at the right time, when things stopped stagnating.
What that means is that my laptop is now roughly comperable in raw performance with anything available that runs Windows. Futhermore, it is roughly equivalent in most areas to an equally-clocked dualcore G5 (borne out by both benchmarks and my own comparision with my G5 tower).
The G5 was a competitive architecture even as stuck as it was--most of the benchmarks I've seen show it as roughly clock-for-clock equivalent with an Opteron)--except mobile wasn't happening, regardless of what IBM said was possible. We now have a new architecture with a lot of promise to play with, some REAL speed in a portable, and the option to jump to AMD if in need.
It'd have been awesome to go with a startup that hit paydirt with their design, but frankly it was a riskier move for Apple than going x86. It wasn't the "cool" decision to make, but so far it seems to have been the right one.
One more thing: From a totally sales standpoint, aside from being able to run a full-speed virtualized Windows install now, it's nice to be able to say to my boss (and others who ask for advice) "Just buy Apple everything. In the event we need to run Windows instead of the MacOS, we'll just install it and dual-boot." That would have meant at least 3 more sales for Apple instead of IBM/Lenovo in the past year and a half.
