barkins said:
What makes you think Apple will release Santa Rosa in April or May?
I don't think that.... I have no idea when or if Apple will release Santa Rosa. But the SR spec is supposed to be finalized at the end of February, placing the first PC notebooks on the market to adhere to the platform in a late march or early April release with the bulk of the industry being April or May. Intel's roadmap places the 800MHz FSB Merom CPUs in late April. That's all I was saying.
Furthermore, their have been discussions here regarding whether or not Apple should stay toe-to-toe with PCs anyway.
They will have to. The "league of their own" philosophy only goes so far. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to continue enticing PC users to 'switch' if they can't keep pace with PC vendors in terms of CPU and GPU offerings. Apple can hype up Leopard all they want and continue their same rhetoric about how they are such innovators, but the reality is that Vista is a very solid OS and even does a few things that Leopard won't.
Like many these days in the multimedia/film/video/animation industries, I run multiple platforms in my workflow. If my Mac systems can't continue to keep pace with my Windows/Linux systems they will be replaced with something more capable with my next upgrade cycle - simple. I need as much CPU power as I can get my hands on and my workstations need the latest GPUs for 3D design work, modeling, animation, visualization, etc.. I haven't bought a Mac Pro because my G5 quads and other PC systems are working just fine for now. But I'm looking to add an 8-core workstation/render system sometime in the next few months. I'm leaning toward the Mac Pro, but if their GPU offerings don't dramatically improve, then I will probably be building a new Windows system.
So, as each week passes, the more I believe they will hold out till January to release something really new and special, but who the heck really knows at this point - I'm just speculating, much like everyone else here.
And that's just it - nobody knows. So those of us that have to buy something do. I already bought a refurbished MBP to hold me over because I could no longer be without a notebook. It doesn't fit my needs real well - I need a notebook that can actually address a full 4GB of RAM, but for no there are none out there... Not from any manufacturer. I won't buy a new system until such a beast shows up. I'm hoping Apple releases something capable in the coming weeks/months. But if it happens to come from a PC vendor, then I will probably wait another few weeks to see if Apple comes through, and then will probably just buy the PC system. All but my Final Cut Studio software is available on both OSX and Windows platforms, so I really don't care which direction I go - it's all about the hardware.
I'm also very frustrated with this entire fiasco.
Yep. All I know is that Apple can probably skate along until MWSF if they adjust their prices. But when MWSF arrives they had better have something good -- as in a system with a new Intel chipset that can allow for AT LEAST 4GB of addressable RAM and a vastly better GPU choice. If they go all the way to late november and only offer a C2D drop-in there's going to be a lot of grumpy people. If they wait all the way to MWSF to offer a C2D drop-in with no other significant upgrades (like at least a GO7900GTX GPU offering, which will be upper mid-range by then), then there will be a lot of people saying "screw you Steve, I'm buying a Dell".
