Jason O’Grady of ZDNet exercised his foretelling ability on the up-coming MacWorld 2006. #3 — 1Gb iPod Nano (to replace the sold-out 1Gb Shuttle), #2 — Intel Mac Mini (another step to conquere the living room) #1 — Widescreen Intel iBook (13.3″ and dual-core Yonah). I would love to have the latest dual core Pentium M running Mac OS X, but wouldn’t that put iBook way ahead of aging PowerBook, which was max-out at 1.67Ghz running G4?
Scott Yang's Playground
Faith, Technology and Randomness in Life, According to Scott
Jan 5 2006
A 1Gb Nano – doubt it. I think it’s more likely to see a slightly larger shuffle, or simply dropping the price of the 2Gb Nano.
Putting Intel processors into the Mac Mini or iBook is probably easier than their high-end machines, due to the lack of Mac software for Intel (unless, Adobe-Macromedia update their suite and launch at MacWorld). But, usually Apple release new processors in their high-end machines first.
Then again, releasing an Intel iBook first would probably have lots of takers, who would still upgrade to a Intel PowerBook when released.
It would be nice if Apple actually gave it’s customers a road-map for the Intel cut-over – although that’s very unlikely to happen.
Faster iBook would only work if universal binaries for high-end applications (Photoshop, Final Cut, etc) are released at the same time as Powerbook (no earlier, no later), and PPC emulation on x86 proves to be much slower than running native in G4. However many Mac enthusiasts today are coming from un*x/Linux land, who will probably compile and use open source apps anyway. x86 iBook will be better for them.
Personally I think Apple will not opt for dual core Yonah but a single core version (even a Dothan), just to give more head zoom for PowerBook later on.
Surely they won’t. Guessing Apple’s roadmap is part of fun of using a Mac :)
Pingback: Pete
Well, we did find out that the entire Mac hardware line will be transitioned to Intel in 2006. So, we sort of got a roadmap.
Pingback: 1Gb iPod Nano | sYp