It seems to be common wisdom (e.g., Daring FireBall) that Apple is going to take a sales hit in their machines as people wait to buy until the new Intel-powered machines come out. But such a conclusion is not obvious to me, especially over the next 3-6 months.
As John Gruber at Daring Fireball says:
in an ideal world, on the day Apple begins shipping Intel-based Macs, all Mac OS X software will have been updated to run natively on both architecturesAnd all that software would be updated for free. Fat chance.
So, if Intel-powered Macs (an entirely new architecture) are starting to come out a year from now (and they're only starting with the low-end Macs; higher end ones don't come out until 2007), and the current software base is not fully upgraded and/or costs money to upgrade, why would you wait to buy a new Mac? I would much rather have a PowerPC Mac bought sometime in the next 6 months to hold me over until the transition had been worked out. Do you want to be a guinea pig? Who knows what kinds of bugs and kinks will need to be worked out in the new architecture? And who wants to put up with some of their "older" software either not working, or working at a much slower speed (as will happen with Rosetta, which translates old PowerPC code to run on the Intel chips)? Furthermore, software makers can produce "universal binaries" that will run on both Intel and PowerPC chips, so at least one upgrade of any existing software should run on both chips, so you won't even have to be stuck with older software.
As the release of the first Intel-powered Macs approaches, sales of existing PowerPC machines probably will decline, but should it decline right now? I don't see why it really should.
Posted by Tom Nugent at June 15, 2005 09:45 AM