I'm pretty much with Seth on this one - not so much that "Journalists don't matter" (but that thought has crossed my mind more than once), but that the stuff on the inside of a Mac doesn't really matter to most folk.

I'm a Mac fan not because of the nitty gritty of the hardware, but because of the usability of the OS. When I read about NeXT years ago, if I'd had the money, I'd have bought one - they seemed "right", or at least more right than anything else on the market at the time. Apple is like that now; The OS is (in my opinion) the best thing you can have on a desktop - it's the OS that got me to switch, and it's the OS that will make me stay.

What might have made me leave is the hardware not being able to keep up - if I can do more on a Windows or a Linux box because the hardware is so much faster, then I'll switch back. Apple has been slowly but surely falling behind in speed for the last few years, as a direct result of IBM not being able to deliver significant improvements in the speed of the G4 and G5 chips without hitting major heat barriers - which in turn means no real improvement in CPU speeds - especially in laptops. The last powerbook range refresh delivered a .17 GHz (that's 170MHz) increase in speed at the top of the range - that's pitiful. Sure, this laptop is still more than fast enough at 1.67GHz, but if the next 3 years of refreshes were to produce a similar amount of improvement, what motivation is there for me to buy a new one? Where's the driver for new hardware purchases?

For all their arguable flaws, Intel do keep raising the barrier - they have to, they have good solid competitors in AMD who force them to keep on pushing forward. Speeds keep going up, they keep innovating to keep the heat down. They make more CPU's than IBM do G4s and G5s, so it's probably fair to say that they can keep the cost per unit lower, while still making a decent profit.

I don't think this will result in significantly cheaper Macs - the majority of the cost in a computer these days isn't the CPU, and Mac fans will remain happy to pay the extra for the quality they feel they're buying, but most of all, for the ability to run OSX.

For the non-geek portion of the Mac fan-base (which has to be at least 50, probably closer to 90%), the CPU is invisible. If Apple can make the switch from G4/G5 to an Intel CPU equally invisible, they'll have a winner. Personally, I think they will, but only time will tell us the truth of that.