louden said:
Hey - maybe it would be a good idea to wait for Santa Rosa - that looks to be a bigger leap in perf then the current merom.
And the longer Apple waits, the eaiser it is for us to wait!
it makes me think it's wiser to wait for Leopard and Santa Rosa - why pay for the OS twice?
Santa Rosa won't affect performance a great deal.
The faster FSB will make a difference of maybe 3-5%. Maybe a little more in bandwidth-sensitive applications (say, some forms of decompression).
The other big differences are the new graphics core -- which the MBP won't use, the 802.11n - for which the spec hasn't yet been ratified, and is something easily added by changing/adding a wifi card, and perhaps the Robson flash caching technology.
It's an advance but it's incremental, in much the way Merom is an incremental update over Yonah.
Whether buyers wait or not tends to be based on what they need and when-- and bear in mind, you can also say "Why not wait for Penryn" -- it'll be faster than Merom. And then wait for...
You can wait forever
However, if Apple waits, a lot of people are going to go elsewhere. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Apple doesn't need to worry about the "true believers" in OS X. Apple has them already, they're not going anywhere.
Apple needs the "switchers", the people who are currently using Windows laptops. Right now, if Apple stays with Core Duo when Dell, Toshiba Sony et al offer Core2, it will cost them a lot of sales.
Some hold out the operating system as the reason to go with Apple. Sure, it's a good reason. However, the "switchers" aren't going to pay premium prices for Apple's hardware when it's using a CPU that is -- according to Intel, no less -- the low-end offering. Remember, people who know nothing compare "bullet points" from ads, and Core2 sounds better than Core.
Remember, the 'switcher" market for the most part hasn't really experienced the OS yet. Once you get them to buy Apple, it might be reason enough regardless of other factors, but Apple can't be behind or they'll lose a lot of sales.
There's a lot of laptops sold in the Christmas period and whether or not people go with Apple will in a lot of cases depend on hardware parity. Apple already has at least the perception of costing more -- regardless of whether that's true (and I personally think it is in the case of the notebooks, but it's a complex argument).
That in itself isn't a problem. People will pay a premium for something percieved as a premium brand. But, they won't if there's a perception that they're paying boutique prices for something that is somehow "low end" -- and that's where they'll see Core in the Dells, etc -- the very cheapest will be Pentium-M and the better low-end and cheapest mid-range systems will be Core. Mid-range and up will be all Core2.
Beyond that, Apple doesn't want you to wait either. Apple wants you to buy now.
Damn. What was meant to be a short response turned into an essay. Oops.
