In recent days, you’ve read preliminary reports about the performance of the new MacIntels. It makes sense for the iMac, since it is really shipping and some actually own one. The picture gets somewhat murky with the MacBook Pro, since it isn’t available yet. The only units seen are preproduction units and it’s always possible things will be altered somewhat by the time the actual product reaches your favorite Apple dealer.

There’s also another obstacle. Most of the applications traditionally used for testing haven’t been converted to Universal form, so they will run native on both PowerPC and Intel processors. When you test older apps on a MacIntel, at best you can measure the speed of Apple’s Rosetta emulation technology, not the potential of the new models.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped people from posting tests of one sort or another. In order to get MacBook Pro scores, a few persuaded the Apple people at the Macworld Expo to allow them to have some extended face time with the new laptops to run a few tests. As an academic exercise, I wouldn’t take them too seriously, although it’s nice to know that the Apple people were patient enough to allow those tests to run.

Apple’s own published benchmarks include a set of SPEC that show off a multiprocessor computer to its best advantage, and a handful of application-related tests. Of course, these tests were performed with one of the small number of Universal apps available from Apple, such as the Pages component of iWork ‘06 and an apparent prerelease version of Final Cut Pro. We know that Apple chose that ones that most favored its new hardware, but, from past experience with such test procedures, I’m certain the results are being reported accurately.

Is it fair to come to any conclusions just yet? Well, the scarcity of Universal applications handicaps the MacIntels big time. But with native software, they shine. In addition, perceptions of user interface performance appear to be quite positive. While such things are highly subjective for the most part, it does seem that, when they’re in their element, a MacIntel seems to run Mac OS X faster than a PowerPC. Finder windows open and resize more rapidly and Universal applications seem to launch with fewer bounces in the Dock. This appears to confirm the news emerging from the developer community from their prerelease MacIntel boxes.

At the same time, in some respects, it’s 1994 all over again. That year, the first PowerPC Macs appeared. There were few native applications and, in fact, even the operating system was mostly emulated. Legacy applications ran much more slowly, and, as now, only a small number coded for the new processor architecture were available. As the operating system became more efficient, and faster processors became available, even emulation exceeded the performance of the older Mac hardware. But it took a year or two for things to settle down.

I don’t expect things to progress near as slowly this time. Apple has had five years to optimize Mac OS X for Intel in its test labs, and developers had enough advance warning to start their work in earnest. That the new computers came out months ahead of schedule, or at least Apple’s official schedule, is no doubt going to push developers to work that much harder to get their products ready. In fact, there are new Universal updates every day, still a trickle but it’s going to become an avalanche before long. Sure, it will take a while for sprawling productivity applications from Adobe, Microsoft and others to get in line, but it’ll give other companies a chance to get the upper hand. Take Quark Inc., for example, which has suffered because of the late arrival of QuarkXPress to Mac OS X, and the perceived loss of customers to Adobe InDesign.

Later this month, a public beta of a Universal version of QuarkXPress 7.0 will be out; at present you can get the betas in PowerPC and Windows versions. The final product is slated for release in the second quarter, according to what Quark representatives are promising, and, based on the condition of the beta, it appears they are being very realistic.

If you take home a new iMac today, and stick with Apple’s own software, or the small number of Universal apps hitting the marketplace, you’ll enjoy a definite performance advantage. If it’s a mixed bag, many functions will appear to run slower compared to most any Mac released in the last year or two. This is the price of being on the cutting edge. However, as your applications are updated, and both Apple and its developers learn to better optimize their products for Intel’s new processor lines, your computer will only get faster.

Here, at the beginning of the transition to MacIntel, this is one of the few opportunities to see such a phenomenon at work.

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All right, you know the score. Apple blasted earnings estimates out of the water last quarter with sales of $5.7 billion, which included 14 million iPods and one-and-a-quarter million Macs. Both were ahead of the previous year, although the increase in computer sales was relatively modest.

But in a universe where expectations of Apple sales have reached almost astronomical proportions, it’s not enough, and Apple’s computer business must be in trouble, at least according to some analysts. How do you figure that? Well, these worthy folks have come to believe the sales figures are a few hundred thousand units short of what they’d hoped for. Maybe so, and we’ll know more when Apple officially discloses all the information about its quarterly earnings on Wednesday. Unfortunately, Apple no longer breaks down Mac sales beyond desktop and laptop, but you can make a few educated guesses regardless.

Prior to the Macworld Expo, it was widely believed that Apple would be introducing a replacement for the Mac mini and the iBook, and I suspect some of you held back your buying plans as a result. Because they were updated in October, sales of the iMac and PowerBook were probably not seriously affected, and the Power Mac has been in the doldrums for quite a while, and it’s questionable whether dual-core processors helped an awful lot.

Now with that prelude, that Mac sales were pretty good overall ought to be considered as encouraging, not disappointing. Now maybe I’m just trying to find excuses, but did you buy a Mac mini or an iBook in the last few months, or did you decide to wait? Did you, as I did, expect the iMac and PowerBook to continue virtually unaltered for the time being? And if you bought either new in the past three months, are you feeling a little upset just about now?

Just because Apple has the first MacIntels out the door, or approaching the entrance in the case of the MacBook Pro, it won’t halt a potential impact to sales. We all know that there will be replacements for the Mac mini and iBook in the months to come, and it’s quite possible those replacements are even now undergoing final production tests for an early introduction. With Apple’s 30th anniversary approaching, you won’t feel foolish if all but the Power Mac has received an Intel upgrade by April 1st.

Since I am often asked to recommend new computers to people, this creates a dilemma. The iMac, of course, is a perfect home and small office personal computer, and you can now feel confident it won’t change in the near future. If you can live with a 15.4-inch screen, and don’t want something larger and smaller, I wouldn’t hesitate to spring for a MacBook Pro, with an exception or two that might still be deal breakers.

The first is the Classic environment, which is now history, and you need to consider that if you still have some legacy apps that you need to run. The second is a solution for running Windows. Now maybe you will be able to dual boot, so you can run both operating systems, although the existing 32-bit version of Windows XP is not compatible with the Intel’s EFI booting firmware used in the MacIntels. Perhaps there will be a hack to address that, or you’ll have to wait for a compatible version or a new Windows emulator.

The existing version of Microsoft Virtual PC won’t run, although it appears an Intel-compatible or Universal version will appear one of these days if the published reports are correct. Another product designed to run Windows on your Mac, iEmulator, is slated to become available in an Intel-compatible version by next month. While the competition to Virtual PC tends to be slower, that should change considerably when they move to Intel. In the meantime, if you need to run Windows applications and don’t want to buy a standard PC for that purpose, you’ll have to wait for one of those solutions to arrive.

Even if you confine your efforts to a standard Mac OS X application, you may still have reason to postpone your buying plans. While Microsoft Office runs well enough, and Apple’s own digital lifestyle applications are Universal now, with the professional applications to follow in March, what about the other products? If you dabble in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, maybe you won’t be too concerned if things run noticeably slower, unless your present Mac is a fairly recent model. Otherwise, there’s yet another reason to wait. Although Quark Inc. is about to release a Universal version of its QuarkXPress 7.0 beta, the final product won’t ship until the second quarter, perhaps after the beta expires. Adobe probably won’t get to its Universal act together until the fall. Even the newly announced After Effects 7.0 is, for now, shipping in standard PowerPC and Windows XP versions.

In the end, it’s still all about the apps. And it’s best to make your purchase decisions accordingly. At the same time, by converting the sweet spot of its Mac line to Intel, Apple has made a huge start towards the latest processor transition. Unless the new models aren’t suitable because of the software you need to run, there’s no reason to hold off anymore, and I suspect Mac sales will look real good this year.

At the same time, I suspect Apple is going to continue to rush its transition, the better to goose development of those high power apps from Adobe and others so they will soon ship with that all-important Universal label.

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Now that Apple has begun to put Macs on an equal footing with standard PC hardware, at least in terms of the basic internal parts, pricing comparisons will become more common. In the past, it was easy to favor Apple in such a comparison, by pointing out that Macs had more standard features and superior bundled software. Of course, you could always find a benchmark in which the PowerPC trounced the Pentium, so all things being equal, you could still say Apple gave you more for your money.

But this has become more difficult in the laptop arena, where Apple went for a professional Intel-based portable and left the consumer price line intact. It’s not that the $1,999 base price for the MacBook Pro is particularly high for a professional laptop with desktop replacement pretensions. In fact, if you compare it to a Dell with similar specifications, Apple does indeed offer a far better value. You’d be amazed how easy it is to pad the price of a Dell with just a few options. This is particularly true because Dell is still pushing products with the older Pentium M processor rather than the Core Duo that Apple is using.

I did a quick run through Gateway’s site and came away with the same results. As PC makers roll out their own portables with the Core Duo, however, this is apt to change the equation.

For example , when you start comparing the MacBook Pro with a second-tier notebook, such as an Acer, Apple doesn’t come out so well. According to a story at MacNexus, you can outfit an Acer TravelMate 8200 to match the MacBook Pro’s price and come out with more standard equipment in some significant respects. The Acer, for example, seems closer in configuration to the high-end Pro, which retails for $2,499. Both have 1GB of memory. The Acer gets a 2GHz Core Duo, same as the 20-inch iMac, while the Pro tops out at 1.83GHz. The performance difference, all things being equal, wouldn’t seem significant without a stopwatch, but the Acer gets superior bragging rights.

Going down the spec sheet, without repeating the numbers completely, you see that the Acer has an ATI X1600 graphics processor to match the MacBook Pro with twice the video memory, a slightly bigger hard drive, plus built-in VoIP, 5-in-1 card reader, swivel screen and a modem. The Pro only has a single-layer DVD burner, compared to the Acer’s dual-layer configuration. On the other hand, Apple adds the iLife ‘06 suite, remote control, ExpressCard slot, backlit keyboard and FireWire. In the real world, Mac OS X Tiger is closer to Windows XP Professional than the Home version of Microsoft’s OS, so that also favors Apple.

Without attaching a dollar value to Apple’s advantages, let’s say they do match the Acer in most respects. However, with a faster processor, larger drive, more graphics memory and a swivel screen, you can see where the PC seems to offer more bang for the buck. I am, of course, ignoring issues of weight and looks for now.

In fairness, of course, this is Apple’s first venture into the Intel world, and it no doubt has lots of development dollars to recover before the new models are really profitable. One could always hope that future Pro notebooks will be competitive in all respects and there’s where all eyes begin to focus on the future of the iBook.

In terms of Apple’s bottom line, I can understand why a professional notebook and the iMac moved to Intel first. They have higher retail prices, greater profit margins and, assuming they are as successful as analysts expect, will keep stockholders happy. At the same time, the Mac mini and the iBook are really long in the tooth now as personal computers go. In comparison to the Intel-based models, they appear to be left in the horse-and-buggy arena. Now you can’t really say the Mac mini is overpriced as entry-level desktops go, but the iBook is another story.

Of course, on the surface, the traditional comparisons are the same. Take an entry-level Dell notebook, such as the Inspiron B130, pack in the extra memory, Windows XP Professional, a basic office suite (to match AppleWorks), and a digital lifestyle suite, and suddenly a $549 computer costs over $1,000. But this is the sort of spec shopping that is seldom done in the real world, where the initial purchase price and a few other basics are all that typical buyers examine.

So when the iBook undergoes its Intel metamorphosis, Apple may indeed want to find a way to offer a $799 or $899 model with the same level of standard equipment. Apple, you see, can’t get away with stripped-down configurations. If the iLife suite becomes optional, for example, Apple’s whole argument of digital lifestyle superiority goes out the window.

No, I don’t expect to see the iBooks successor any cheaper than that. In the end, it may come out at the same price as the current model, $999, with Apple pointing to the expected built-in iSight camera and remote as evidence that it offers superior value for the money. Let’s just hope the customers are listening.

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