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.

All is right with the universe.

I like the RSS elements incorporated into Safari, but I still think I like Firefox better. The live bookmark feature of Firefox is still a bit more intuitive, I think, than the RSS reading capabilities in Safari. That said, the ability to combine multiple RSS feeds and then apply keyword searching to that merged feed is pretty damn sexy.

Intel already is inside every PC and PDA that matters.

My religious zealotry aside, I can’t help but question the ability of this joint venture to do anything really beneficial. Intel’s role in Wi-Fi is largely peripheral and somewhat opportunistic in my eyes (the Centrino marketing campaign is little more than an attempt to brand Wi-Fi as an Intel creation). AT&T have been showing a frustrating tendency to shift their strategy for bypassing the RBOCs every year or so (Cable, anyone? UNE, anyone? Dixie cups a strings, anyone?). Add to this the fact that the powers that be at AT&T still dont really get IP even after all these years.

Add to this the rousing success that Cometa, the joint venture of AT&T, Intel and IBM, which was supposed to set the Wi-Fi hotspot world on fire, somehow only managed to launch press releases. Theres not a great track record of success for either of these companies in the space into which they now both tread.