I still have problems with this
Ok, I changed my view to a 50% chance of a release a day or two ago after seeing Apple does appear to have a major presence (not just a routine presence) at E3 complete with "backrooms" to demonstrate products at. This implies some kind of release at E3. Though it may just represent a big push for the Intel Macs.
I still am sticking with 50% on the grounds that a release at E3 doesn't fit. I'm speculating about what a MacBook is, and I can't find a configuration that works.
If this is a GMA950 based machine, and they release it at $999 (which they pretty much have to if it has a Core Duo, if not even higher), the types of people who go to E3 will crucify Apple. E3 is a gaming show. The GMA950 is not a gaming chip. Its performance compared to the antiquated Radeon 9200 is poor. Now, some of you might be thinking "But it's fine! I don't play games" or "It's not the best, but it's good enough", but you're missing the point. This isn't something that's being launched from the Apple campus in a Stevenote aimed at .edu buyers. This is being launched at a games show. It'd be like Apple launching a "Video iPod" at the Sundance Festival that only shows movies in black and white, and has a limit of 30 seconds, 5 fps, for the movies it shows.
And remember: you can get a non-Mac notebook with proper ATI graphics and a much bigger screen for under $1,000 at the moment. Just do some looking around. If you want to really scare yourself, go to Staples or OfficeMax, don't just limit yourself to online offers. Yes, the 17" (!) laptop with the ATI graphics (!!) that costs $999 (!!!OMG WTF?!!!) at Staples (No, it can't be? He's making it up! He has to be!) may have a Cerelon, but it's not a bad CPU by modern standards. And games really do benefit more from good GPUs than good CPUs, hence UT2004 running faster on a G4 Mac mini than a Intel Core Duo Mac mini.
So, ok, they launch the MacBook with, say, an X1600. Or maybe an X1200. Now we're creeping in on iMac territory. For $999 (assuming they keep that as the low end price) you get a machine that almost certainly will have a smaller disk, and maybe a slightly slower GPU, but is otherwise comparable to the iMac that costs $300 more. A notebook that competes, on price, with the iMac.
So maybe Apple bumps the price, perhaps the low end Macbook will cost the same as the low end iMac. But that then undermines the Macbook's position as a low cost laptop. The EDU market may be suckers, but they're not going to tell all their students to get $1,300 laptops when a well spec'd laptop is generally in the $750-1,000 range. Yeah, short term it might work, as there are presumably many courses that rely upon Macs, but the long term effect of this would be for many establishments to move away, especially in an environment where they can tell students that already got them to just stick Windows on their machines.
There are several things I'm largely convinced of:
1. The low end Macbook will start at around $800-1,000. Before this week, and the revelations that all Macbooks will have Core Duos, I assumed $800-950 as the starting price, simply because the market's shifted, and $740-850 is what a top-of-the-line low-end laptop costs from companies like Dell and Acer (see previous comments.) The closer to $1,000 they get, the more overpriced their machines will look.
2. To get to that price, and not make higher end machines look expensive, they'll almost certainly forgo ATI graphics and use the Intel GMA950.
3. If they avoid (1), they have a chance of avoiding (2) too, but then they risk pricing themselves out of the market altogether. Essentially they would be withdrawing from the budget notebook market completely. All this fluff about Apple expecting this to be their top-seller tends to go against this.
4. E3 is not the right venue to launch a GMA950 based laptop that doesn't come with Windows.
What is Apple launching on Tuesday?
