08th Jun 2005
No More Than A Mac Mini For Now
I’ve had a couple of days to ponder the Apple/Intel marriage. I’ve read numerous articles about it. It’s going to work out to be a really good thing. What seems to have been the problem is that IBM just didn’t have their heart into making great chips for Apple in a timely manner. Imagine how embarassing it would be for Steve Jobs to do next January’s keynote and say “we still don’t have a G5 PowerBook, but we have a speed bumped G4 that will run for two hours on a charge”.
So the mid-term future is bright, but how will Apple spin the next 12 months? What G5 product are they going to introduce that won’t be seen as a sitting duck? Could they possibly introduce a machine with a swappable CPU/Logic Board? (G5 now, Intel later?) Nah, somehow a convertible strategy feels like a real reach, even when considering the radical moves we’ve seen from Apple.
My short-term strategy is this: minimize the Apple hardware commitment. My daughter is about to turn 12, and her G3 PowerBook is showing its age (hinge just broke, CD drive doesn’t work, too slow to run a couple of apps we have in mind). I had considered getting her a G5 iMac, but now a better strategy seems to be: get a Mac mini + Airport, bump up the RAM, and get an LCD monitor (I love my Sony SDM-HS75P, so perhaps another one of those). We can think about an Intel Mac next year, and transition the Mac mini to be the entertainment / house server, or throw Ubuntu Linux on it.
There’s a lot more to say on this, and it would be much faster to just podcast it :-) My sense is that the Mac community is going through a highly emotionally charged time (what!? Intel?!), and that a sense of acceptance will quickly emerge - something along the lines of “IBM is cool for certain things, but they really dropped the ball on Apple, and it’s a good thing that Apple had a contingency plan in place”.
