Give me a break. Some of the statements I’ve read in recent days about whether the latest refresh of the Power Mac line is worth your attention seem downright silly. They usually go like this, and I’m not singling out any specific person for criticism here, but: Apple is moving to Intel beginning next year. It won’t be long before even today’s Power Mac is long in the tooth, so why spend a bundle on one?

Besides, gas is expensive and the family SUV drinks a gallons and gallons of it while you’re out doing your daily chores. You have to have priorities, and maybe you could live with your present Mac workstation a year or two longer. If lots of people feel this way, it may well be that the Power Mac G5 Quad will fail big time in the marketplace. Or maybe buy a compact car, so they have enough money left over to acquire that new Mac after all.

Does any of this make sense to you?

Well, let’s journey back in time, say four years. At that time, the fastest Power Mac used a G4, and, as far as anyone knew, would continue to use a G4 in the foreseeable future. But it would, of course, get faster. You could take this trip back to 1991 and use the Motorola 68040 as an example with the same result.

You could, back then, argue, that it made no sense to buy the fastest Mac of the time, because there would be a faster ones a year or two in the future, and probably a lot sooner. Why buy a new computer at all? There’s always a faster one on the horizon, and you can’t afford to keep chasing the end of the rainbow. This processor speed race is just a silly marketing tool anyway. Isn’t your computer fast enough as it is?

All right, I think this is all getting a little too ridiculous to treat sensibly. But consider one more thing: Suppose, just suppose, that IBM didn’t have problems delivering ever-faster versions of the G5 in sufficient quantities and in a timely fashion. What if Apple didn’t need to move to Intel? All right, that simultaneous top secret project of building Mac OS X for x86 wasn’t done just as an exercise. Maybe it was Steve’s goal all along, and he was just looking for an excuse, but that’s really an area of speculation that I won’t go into right now.

But if you could depend on a much faster Power Mac G5 next year, would your conclusions be the same, that it’s not worth buying one right now? It would make just as much sense, which is little to none.

Now I don’t know when the Power Mac will become a MacIntel. This commentary site never trucks in rumors, although I try to speculate for fun, but surely not for profit. The reason I don’t know is that there is no such model on the immediate horizon, and since Apple’s processor switchover timetable will not conclude until the end of 2007, it’s safe to say that it may not happen until the very end of the process. Although there’s no official announcement of any specific plans, the tea readers have gone over Intel’s processor roadmap and suggested that the first MacIntel will probably be the Mac mini or the PowerBook. Sure, the latter just had a very minor upgrade, if more pixels on the screen and faster memory can be regarded as an upgrade.

Then, I suppose, you could argue that there’s no sense buying a PowerBook now, because the latest upgrade doesn’t count for much. Besides, if you’re over 25, you probably need glasses to see text on the screen unless you manually adjust text sizes in your favorite applications. But that’s just idle talk, because I haven’t had a chance to work on the new PowerBook, and I fail to see a compelling reason to trade in my 1.5GHz version.

The long and short of it is that if you need a new Mac now, buy the fastest one available. With all the new product introductions in recent weeks, don’t expect anything to be replaced for a while, except maybe the iPod. Apple is moving extremely fast with those things. Even that allegedly “secret” Mac mini upgrade is hardly worth the trouble. Only people with stop watches will notice the difference if they react fast enough. In fact, I’m somewhat tempted to consider a Power Mac G5 Quad. It’s not that my first generation dual 2GHz version is all that old in the scheme of things. It still runs pretty fast for my taste, and it has been optioned to the hilt with 2GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon X800 XT graphics card. The fastest process I run, which is encoding the live feed of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, goes off without a hitch, and I’m able to run a number of applications a the same time without a hint of a stutter.

You know, maybe I should just wait after all. What do I need a new Mac for anyway, right?

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Despite the misleading spin about what Steve Jobs really said to explain Apple’s move to Intel chips, let’s take him at his word, which is more than sufficient to raise some fascinating possibilities. We’re talking about lower power chips with greater performance than what IBM could offer, and that includes those new dual-core chips.

But what will that mean in the real world? Well, you can glean a few clues from unofficial reports from Mac developers who have paid $999 to lease the Developer Transition Kit, which includes a Power Mac with a Pentium 4. Even though the statements aren’t officially confirmed, we hear about a more responsive Mac OS X user interface. Of course, now that cat is out of the bag about Apple’s stealth project of developing an Intel version simultaneously with the PowerPC version, you have to wonder. Why would it seem snappier under an Intel chip that the PowerPC supposedly “smokes” it various and sundry application benchmarks?

Of course, the user interface isn’t included in those benchmarks, but why would Mac OS X seem so well optimized for that other computing platform? One very logical answer comes from columnist Rob Enderle, writing in TechNewsWorld, who speculates on the what we might expect from Apple in 2006:

“Desktop hardware will be visibly changed as well as Intel favors BTX designs for cooling and noise containment. What’s new in this area is small form factor, high performance products. When I say high performance, I’m not just blowing smoke, as the labs I’m in contact with are reporting performance improvements that even I find hard to believe.

“Speculation is that since the UNIX kernel the Mac OS starts with is optimized for Intel before being ported to the Power platform, the result, up until now, has been a significant performance setback. Going back to Intel removed this inefficiency, which the applications have had to make up. The result, we understand, is like suddenly finding your emergency brakes were stuck on. Now Intel test systems are acting like they have permanent after-burners.”

Now I’m not about to comment on his speculation about form factors and pricing. Trying to anticipate Apple’s moves even a month ahead is difficult. Steve Jobs and his crew are notorious for telling us that they do not intend to build a specific product, and then do just that a few weeks or months later. I don’t need to remind you about the Mac mini, the $500 Mac, the iPod with video, Flash-based iPods, and all the rest.

However, Enderle makes a lot of sense when he talks of native Mac OS X performance. You might think that Apple would have to optimize performance for Intel processors, but the fact is that the reverse has been true. Mac OS X’s kernel was already built for Intel and had to be optimized for PowerPC, and it still carries a lot of baggage. Even though Tiger is better than previous versions of Mac OS X in this regard, run it on a Blue & White Power Mac G3, with standard issue processor, hard drive and graphics card, with nothing added but a huge memory upgrade. Consider how “the world’s most advanced operating system” just about keeps up with Mac OS 9 in a user interface comparison and you’ll understand what I mean.

Now take a look at Windows XP, even on an basic box from Dell or Gateway. Sure, the integrated graphics chip will deliver simply awful performance on your favorite PC games, but the user interface seems to just fly. This accounts for a large part of the perception that the typical PC is faster than the Mac, even if you can demonstrate otherwise with key graphic applications.

Consider how Microsoft’s applications behave on the Mac. Sure Word and Excel seem responsive enough, but Entourage can be absolutely glacial in some functions, such as deleting a bunch of old messages. Does that mean it’s secretly optimized for Intel or just coping with the bottlenecks of an operating system that, itself, was originally designed for x86?

I have been very optimistic about Apple’s switch to Intel from the very beginning. It’s not just the advantage of higher performance from iBooks and PowerBooks, but the benefits of even greater battery life. It’s not just being able to lug a Power Mac around without suffering a back ache. It’s the performance factor. The operating system will look the same, but imagine it running at warp drive. Thank you, Mr. Enderle, for raising a very sensible issue that we have overlooked for far too long.

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