It’s been a very long week for me this past week, complete with not one but two late night concerts. It was Erasure at the 9:30 Club on Monday. The show was a big wave of nostalgia for those of us who grew up with the synth pop sound of Vince Clark and the vocals of Andy Bell. Tuesday night was my Chinese class, in which we had a quiz (I did alright) and then a farewell dinner for my friend Michael who was headed back to his job with USAID in Indonesia. Wednesday was a client support day followed by The Killers at Merriweather Post Pavilion. Since then and including today Ive been mired in preparing for a presentation I have next week and preparing for my Chinese final. All this prep work will be joined by a big development project due to a client next week. Fun, fun, fun!!
One big piece of news I wanted to touch base on from this past week is, of course, the news that Apple will transition to Intel CPUs. I, honestly, did not buy the rumors when I first read them. I was certain that what we would hear would be Apples use of Intel chips in a certain subset of products, but not that they would replace the CPUs for the whole line. Ill be honest that I was blown away.
To this day I still cannot tell whether or not this is a good thing for Apple or Macintosh loyalists such as myself. Clearly the OS will make the transition with flying colors, which is obviously a good thing. Walt Mossberg says as much in his column from this past week. The big questions seem to be whether or not speed improvements and developers will follow?
For my own part, I know that Im not going to buy a new machine until the transition has been made for the model I want to buy. I am looking for a new PowerBook in about a years time, which should probably coincide with the introduction of an Intel chip into that line of Macs. One good thing Im hopping to see is that Intel will enable faster PowerBooks. One thing Intel seems to have done a very good job in the past few years is with the power consumption, heat dissipation and speed of their chips designed specifically for laptops. Considering weve seen sales of laptops outpace desktops, I think the move to Intel might be overall a good one for Apple because it will enable them to offer faster laptops. The continued delay in introducing a G5 laptop has been a real frustration.
A good number of the people in the tech press are saying that this transition is no reason to hold off on buying a new Mac. Theyre probably right, but for the obsessed types like me this is plenty reason.
One very cool issue was brought up on the Make magazine podcast This was the idea that Intel-based Macs would enable people (with perhaps some tweaking) to install Windows on their Macs to create dual-boot machines. As much as I dislike Windows, there are a number of work applications that do not have Macintosh versions (or dont have versions I want to pay for out of my own pocket). This has some potential. I would throw Linux on there, too, and just be able to boot any operating system I want. It would be a tough marketing message for Apple to make, but they could potentially market their machines as being the universal computer.
I need to caveat this last point by reminding everyone that I actually did not believe the Intel rumor when it first came out. So maybe I’m just oblivious. I dont buy for a minute Robert Cringelys theory that Apple and Intel will merge in an effort to bring down Microsoft. That particularly column gave me a serious flashback to a Macworld article from the early 1990s insisting that Sony and Apple would merge.
