How worried are you?

[Magnus]

Now that we've had a few days to digest the news from a couple of days ago, and we know for sure that there are Intel-based Macs, what are your thoughts?

Here are some of mine... it's great that Apple is now selling Intel-Macs, and I hope they keep pushing the transition, because that's where we're going, whether we like it or not. iLife 06 seems exciting. For me, iPhoto especially is something I look forward to, but I think iWeb looks pretty cool too. It's all about podcasting, photocasting, etc on the internet. In other words, pushing out content to users over the net, whether it's audio or photos. iWork however, I'm still dissapointed with. The upgrades to KeyNote and Pages are probably good, but there's no spreadsheet. I'd like to throw out MS Office but I need a spreadsheet and right now, Excel is pretty much it (I know there's NeoOffice but it's slow as molasses).

I still feel that Apple missed a great chance to do something in home entertainment and especially video/TV. I'm guessing that launch will come when they can show off an Intel-based Mac mini, so perhaps it's coming. But they do video through the iTMS but it needs to go further than that. Sure we consume video in places other than our livingrooms but the livingroom is still where most of us watch TV, movies, etc.

And finally, if you're a current Mac user, you're most likely using a PowerPC Mac (unless you're still on 68k). If so, how worried are you about the availability of OS X and other software for PPC, now that we know the Intel-switch is on for real? We know that sooner or later Apple is going to stop making software and updates for PPC, but how far away is that? And what about third party software manufacturers and makers of peripherals? I was around when Apple went from 68k to PPC and from what I remember, for me at least, it was a rather painless switch. Applications started to be released as Fat binaries and everything still ran fine on my IIcx, until I bought a PPC Mac (Quadra 660AV). My guess (and hope) is that Apple continues to develop and support OS X for PPC for at least a few years. And I would think they would have to since they still sell PPC systems, and most likely will continue to do so throughout 2006. And as long as they is a OS X being updated for PPC, there will most likely be other software too. So your PPC Macs will continue to be useful for a long time. If you did buy an iMac G5 recently, I can understand if you're a bit ticked off, though...