Macintelworld 2006

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you know about the Macworld Expo.

For full coverage check out Engadget.

The big news of course is the switch. They are rolling out the Macintels like crazy. They are no longer calling their laptops Powerbooks, they are now called MacBook Pro’s. Kinda catchy if you ask me. What I really like is their size and weight – something only possible if you really take advantage of the new Intel chipsets. It seems they are really taking advantage of the Intel Core Duo form factor. This has not been the case on the PC side for the most part.

The other aspect I am looking forward to, now that we are all running on the same hardware, is intensified competition in several areas. We will now be able to compare Apples to PC’s both from a hardware/form factor as well as software (how fast is CS2 on the Wintel vs Macintel). I don’t care who wins (as it will change weekly) but I look forward to the advantages it will provide the consumer.

It will also be interesting to see how the Macintel thing works. Apple is a hardware company, that is how they make their dough. They make hardware and they generally make it very, very, well. In the ‘old’ days Apple had their own hardware and their own software. Easy sell if you were onboard. Now you are going to walk into Best Buy look at a Vaio, then at the MacBook Pro. They will have the same specs and will look almost the same. Consumers who choose Apple (a hardware company) will be doing so strictly because of software – interesting and cool all the same. Also not a stretch considering how nice OSX is.

If the Ipod ever slows down, which it will once people figure out that being forced to marry yourself to one option like Itunes (and vice versa) sucks, it will be interesting to see what happens.