Personally, I'm looking forward to this. As the owner of an 800MHz G4-based iMac, it's inherently to my benefit if Intel continues to produce newer and faster components.
I'd also like to address a previous poster's up-thread comment about it being a bad thing that Intel now gets to dictate Apple's system iteration cycles.
It's about darn-frakin'-time someone started forcing Apple into updating their platform on a faster cycle. Short-term, it's a boon to customers because we have access to more up-to-date technology. Long-term, it's a boon to Apple because they won't be allowed to get away with establishing a reputation for themselves as always playing catch-up on the hardware front.
I'll give Apple all the props in the world for Mac OS X, but Apple needs to rev their product line's underpinnings a bit more. Otherwise, all they're effectively doing is sitting on their laurels and making their customers second-rate owners of computer hardware technology.
I'd been thinking quite a while about getting a 2.4GHz iMac, but now I'm seriously looking into building a PC capable of running Leopard, but nominally running Linux. I mean, it would actually be a benefit to me (over buying purely Apple-branded hardware) since I would have the best of both worlds. And frankly, have you folks seen Compiz Fusion?
As someone else also up-thread pointed out, Apple doesn't introduce a product and then incrementally reduce the price on it. A friend of mine and I were actually talking about this very thing a few weeks ago, and at that time (since I really don't pay any attention to PC computer vendors, their products or business practices) I didn't realize this was the case. But yes, lo and behold, this is how things are. But not in Steve Jobs land. Nope, you introduce a product and keep selling it at the same price, month after month, quarter after quarter, even though your volume-discount wholesale prices drop like a stone. Great strategy for Apple, but a really lousy one for us, their customers.
Now, I know writing this that a lot of you will be quick to point out that, while Apple has to underwrite actual significant R&D because of Mac OS X (and Server) as well as the iLife Suite, other vendors such as Dell, et al, don't, since they really have no comparable position on those areas to Apple, and therefore simply don't have the expenses. However, first off, most PC vendors choose to have very low profit margins to begin with, most fight for table scraps because, even though "the world runs on PCs", that's really a collective comment on the PC market. Secondly, Apple has, all of these R&D expenses notwithstanding, a fairly insane amount of ready, liquid cash laying about ($15+ bn at last count), so clearly these "other expenses" are not seriously eating away at Apple's profitability and therefore require Apple to artificially prop their product prices (and therefore their margins) up like they do.
Besides, I've come to prefer the benefits of having peer-reviewed code to the sort of code which is typical of commercial, private development efforts.
However, this thread really isn't about the argument between Apple and Linux, nor Commercial vs Open-Source, so I will stop here, lest one of the admins decide to slap my hand.
