Some people think the Pentium II is the fastest processor in the world. Not quite. The chip inside every Power Macintosh® G3 is up to twice as fast*. Think different.

Remember the days when the Apple fanboys made fun of the pokey Intel procs? I actually had the above as my background screen on my spanking new Beige G3 (the last Mac I ever bought)! Apple today announced the first set of Intel based macs. You can read about the news elsewhere, but this post is for commentary and comments!

The performance of the dual core intel procs looks fantastic, and from the reviews I've read on Windows dual core laptops, the battery life is also better. So dual core is a win-win (this is why we like computers). What better exmple of this than the new iMacs being offered at the same price but with a 2-4x performance increase, faster graphics card, built in camera and the latest and greatest Apple software.

The laptop was what I was really interested in seeing, and so far am pretty exited about it. Other companies can't be bothered to include a DVI port on their laptops (despite the fact that they must already have the chipset to power the built-in LCD). Apple lays the spank down with dual-link DVI on the new MacBook Pro. This machine looks all around nice, and not unexpected pricing starting at $1999. For the amount of hardware, software, new screen and form factor this seems like a really solid laptop purchase.

The big question for me is whether Windows will run on these laptops. I'm not talking about reformatting it immediately and running only Windows. A good portion of the value of the machine is obviously the OS and applications. However, I can't commit to spending that much if I am locked 100% into Mac. It's too big an investment. I have to have a fallback position to ease the transition over.

No word on a new iPod Shuffle. These had been discounted and cleared out of the channels, so I suppose we'll see an update sometime soon. The low end iBook like was also being heavily discounted, so who knows what the story is with that. They can't really mess with the new MacBook, so maybe it will just wither away or use a single core or something.

Yeah over all a solid announcement. People always expect more. There were some good speculations this time around too, such as screen Shuffle, Media Center killer Intel Mac Mini. The more far out one I read was Apple entering the gaming market. -Yeah right.

The MacBook (stupid name me thinks), looks pretty solid. Mac users are going to love that since it really cranks up the performance over the G4. I think that mag plug thing is pretty cool since pretty much everyone has tripped over their laptop power cord. I agree with J, that what I'm most interested in seeing is if this thing will dual boot to Windows. If so then I predict it will be a very hot item indeed.

I think they are just trying to get the name "Mac" into all their products. The iBook will become "MacBook", and the PowerBook is now "MacBook Pro".

Sort of like trying to spread the name "Pod": podcasting, etc.

It's also funny that the day Apple announces Intel Macs, their stock price closes at $80.86... that's nice work!

The iMac update was a bit of a suprise, seems like it was just updated a few months ago.

About the Shuffle, it's still available on the Apple website. The 1gb version went out of stock before xmas and I think that fueled the speculation the shuffle would be updated.

David Pogue of the NY Times wrote "Intriguingly, they'll all be technically capable of restarting in Microsoft Windows - not using an off-the-shelf copy, but perhaps with the assistance of a software kit written by some enterprising programmer."

Hmmmm... I wonder...

Nah, they always say stuff like that when they think a keynote fell short. It's like the stuff you say to your kids when they are bad... "I was going to take you to McDonalds today, but not now." In this case Job's says, "I was going to announce something totally cool today, but I won't because Intel's been bad."

Every day now I follow several links that alternate between proclaiming that the intelMac will boot Windows and that it won't.

Here is another one.

I also heard that the x64 version of windows will use the new EFI bios, but that the Core Duo chips don't support x64??? If so, that would really suck just from a computation perspective. Anyway, unless there's some crazy trusted computing stuff running in the EFI bios, I don't see why this won't be solved eventually, at least for Vista.

Crash Different

Angry, angry young man.

Now I know what kind of stuff the M$ boys are passing around the lunchroom! Pretty funny though. I definitely have more trouble with a mac now than a PC. The first thing that always gets me is that you have to resize a windows just by the bottom right corner. Apparently I'm always grabbing the edges of windows to resize them.

So they've got the macbook running XP. Apparently it's pretty stable but there are some differences with the video card interface so the graphics aren't hardware accelerated. Things like WiFi do work however.

With "virtualization" and dual cores being all the rage, I'm surprised that people aren't looking at running the OSs simultaneously. There's been talk of a virtual pc type environment, which might be pretty cool.

17" MacBookPro out now. Do people really like huge laptops?

I don't. The 15" MacBook is as large a laptop as I'd buy. On the other hand, if you aren't a gamer, the 17" would be a nice home machine if you didn't intend to go mobile with it, since there are virtually no cables or fan noise and would take up much less space on a table.

I'm interested in when I'll just have an iPod size computer that I can plug into any monitor/kbd/mouse/network and get going. But till then, I'm much more interested in a 12" laptop with DVI for big screen than a 17".

I think that the 17" laptops are nice if you want one computer but have occasional need to move it to another room or take it somewhere. Since the battery life is so horrible though you really have just a 'portable'. Maybe they could just drop the battery all together to save money? I think I would prefer a Laptop to an IMac type machine in a small room (excluding price) since it takes up less volume and can be folded flat.

Get a MacBook Pro in your choice of of 24 colors! This company will sell you a new pre painted one, or you can send your's in for a bling upgrade. The metallic black (carbon) looks pretty sweet. They all sell the Dell model I'm getting.

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