Hattig said:
You are talking out of your rump.
By the end of 2007, around 25% of the Mac market will be using Intel based Macs. By the end of 2008 it might be 50%.
It's true, I'm no expert. I think your 50% estimation might even be too high.
However, think of all the little PC shareware and freeware applications. If you are a real computer geek these apps can be a lot of fun and very useful. If I can emulate these apps on a mactel then that's a lot of utility gained right there. Furthermore, if these PC shareware/freeware developers can port their apps to mactel in a breeze, i think it is much more likely that they will. And finally think of all the commercial windows software available. I grant that 95% of all this windows software is garbage, but that 5% is still pretty nice... Just being able to play all WMP movies without a problem would be wonderful.
That doesn't even take into account how crappy the G4 is. I have a freakin powerbook g4 1.5ghz and a power mac g5 1.6ghz. First of all the G5 absolutely annihiliates the G4 in terms general computer usage - just take opening safari as an example: G5 opens in about 1/4 of a bounce, the powerbook opens in about 1.5 bounces.
Now let's take all the rumors that have been slipping through about how BLAZINGLY fast the developer boxes run Mac OS X. If these rumors are even 1/2 true, the Yonah chip, being released 1/06, is the likely candidate for new mac portables. It is even faster than the Pentium M and I'm guessing will be at least comparable with the top end P4 in the dev boxes.
These portables will definitely be faster than my 2 year old G5.
Now consider power consumption: The Pentium M can get 4 hours battery life no problem. The powerbook G4 probably averages between 2 1/2 and 3 hours. The napa chip (portable yonah), will probably get around 5 hours.
And finally regarding the date of release of mactels. Yes, mid 2006 was what apple said. But it makes perfect sense for them to overestimate the time until transition. They don't want people to hang around and wait for the mactels to come out. They want people to buy existing computers until the mactels are ready. So now they can come out in January, as soon as yonah goes into big production, and say, "wow, we've made better progress than we expected. Check out our new line of fantastically improved Mactel laptops! Available today!" Now they don't have to deal with the 3 month period where everyone is holding out for mactels to come out.
Okay and if they aren't going to release intel powerbooks until mid 2k6, then they better put the freakin awesome IBM 970FX into a powerbook between now and then. That on its own is worth waiting for.
