I just finished watching the webcast of Steve Jobs at the Macworld expo in San Francisco, where he unveiled today the newest innovations coming out of Apple. I’m a huge Mac addict — I’m typing now on my third iBook. And Job’s announcement that the newest “Macbooks” and iMacs will come with Intel dual core processors installed is certainly big news. But I have to say that I’m not ready to run out and get the latest “Macbook” or iMac just cause it has a new chip.
The dual core Intel chip just doesn’t do much for me as a regular computer user. Perhaps if I was rendering 3D graphics or editing a movie it would make a huge difference. But for my purposes, the PowerPC G4 chip is plenty fast.
What’s more innovative is Apple’s announcement of an agreement with Microsoft that allows people to install Windows onto the new Intel Macs. Apple won’t support the operating system or anything bad it might do to your computer, but they also won’t do anything to prevent people from installing Windows. What this means is that for the millions of potential Mac buyers who were on the fence because of all of the Windows software they have already invested in, a Mac suddenly becomes a much more attractive machine.
Now it will take some technical agility to install Windows; it certainly won’t be “plug and play.” But the idea of being able to dual-boot a machine into Windows or the Mac OS is plenty exciting for lots of geeks out there, including me.
The new program iWeb (part of the newest iLife suite) does seem like a sweet little web publishing system. The ability to build websites on-the-fly incorporating a blog, photo galleries and a podcast is really awesome. Seems worlds easier and more intuitive than anything Macromedia is putting out there. And its free with all new Apple systems.