Should I buy a new Intel Mac now?
A few people have asked me whether they should upgrade to the new Intel laptops. One advantage to consumers for Apple moving to Intel is that we have a lot more information about future products. The MacBook Pro uses the 32-bit Yonah processor, basically a two-processor Dothan. Merom, Intel's next generation of processors, is due this September and features 64-bit support among other things (micro-op fusion, LaGrande TPM, hardware support for virtualization, SSE4, NX_Bit).
Many commercial programs like Shake and Photoshop aren't x86-native yet. Office will be out as early as March but Photoshop won't be x86-native until 2007 since they're still using a lot of unportable carbon. Even Firefox 1.5.0.1 isn't native yet. Legacy programs will run in emulation under Rosetta at PowerPC speeds, but that's hardly a selling point.
If you don't use pro apps and you don't mind buying a new computer every year and flipping the old one on eBay then you might consider getting a MacBook Pro. But if you're more likely to buy one computer and hold onto it for 5 years I wouldn't want to get stuck without 64-bit support. By waiting till next October you can get 64-bit Merom, native pro applications, and avoid rev. 0 bugs all at once. Right now the people who really need a new Intel Mac are the developers who will be spending the next eight months porting their applications.
Many commercial programs like Shake and Photoshop aren't x86-native yet. Office will be out as early as March but Photoshop won't be x86-native until 2007 since they're still using a lot of unportable carbon. Even Firefox 1.5.0.1 isn't native yet. Legacy programs will run in emulation under Rosetta at PowerPC speeds, but that's hardly a selling point.
If you don't use pro apps and you don't mind buying a new computer every year and flipping the old one on eBay then you might consider getting a MacBook Pro. But if you're more likely to buy one computer and hold onto it for 5 years I wouldn't want to get stuck without 64-bit support. By waiting till next October you can get 64-bit Merom, native pro applications, and avoid rev. 0 bugs all at once. Right now the people who really need a new Intel Mac are the developers who will be spending the next eight months porting their applications.