| Friday, December 30, 2005 |
13:00 - Here Comes Santa Jobs
http://weblog.roth-cline.net/archives/2005/12/macworld_2006_p.html
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Matt Roth-Cline has some fairly confident predictions about MacWorld 2006, which seems to have snuck up on me (I don't know if I can handle this many holidays this close together):
I confidently predict that the PowerBook will switch to the Intel Core Duo in January 2006, either with or before the iBook switches. When the iBook switches — which I think is likely, although not certain, to also happen in January — I predict it will use the Intel Core Solo. Typical iBook users won’t get that much performance improvement from a dual-core chip, and once again, even the slowest Intel Core Solo chips will blow away the pokey 1.42GHz G4 in the fastest current iBook.
This switch would do another nice thing for Apple: help differentiate the iBook and PowerBook lines. As of right now, the PowerBook’s “professional” qualities are relatively few. Sure, it has a faster processor (by less than 20%) and a nice backlit keyboard, but that’s not a whole lot of differentiation. When Mac guru John Gruber says that “The most obvious reason to get a 15- or 17-inch PowerBook instead of an iBook are the built-in displays”, you have a differentiation problem.
Switching the iBook to the Solo and the PowerBook to the Duo solves that problem quite elegantly, for a number of different reasons. Technically, professionals are the kind of users that will fully utilize dual-core processors; typical consumer usage doesn’t yet need the second core. On the business side, dual-core versus single-core is a good differentiator because Apple’s margins on the PowerBook can be higher than the extra costs for the dual-core chip. For marketing, having a dual-core PowerBook and a single-core iBook mirrors the largely successful differentiation between the iMac and the Power Mac. The entire Mac line becomes easier to understand: single processors in consumer Macs, multiple processors in pro Macs.
This is in contrast to the general hazy consensus that it's the iBook that will switch first because of the idea that Apple wants to sort of sneak in the Intel processors in low-end machines where nobody will notice them. Roth-Cline's analysis of the numbers, and the fact that Intel Core will cause no penalty to pro users—except in their pocketbooks when they upgrade their software to Intel-native versions, at which point their machines will suddenly effectively become much faster—turns that whole theory on its head. And I certainly agree that it would be dumb to have iBooks on Intel and PowerBooks on measurably slower G4s for a bunch more money.
I do still think the Mac mini (currently with a 1.25/1.42 GHz G4) is a candidate for the Intel switch, but I'm not so sure about it anymore. If Intel is seen as a "step backwards" for Apple, then it makes sense to put them in the bottom-end machines first, and the Mac mini (one of which I just got my folks for Christmas to replace their 1999-vintage blue iMac) would certainly fall into that category. But if the Intel chips are something Jobs will instead be crowing about as a great leap forward, trying to get people excited over... well, not only does it make sense to move the PowerBooks, but the Mac mini might want to wait a while. That could keep it positioned where it is in the lineup, as the undisputed entry-level machine, and it could retain its undisputed entry-level price. It would be a bad idea, after all, to make the Mac mini a speed rival for the iMac G5 at a third the price.
As always, I don't feel any particular need to put any stakes in the ground during prediction season; I prefer to just wait and see what shows up under the tree. But be that as it may, I'd say Matt's analysis is pretty sound.
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Brian Tiemann
