As an apple fan, I have been avidly following the apple rumor sites in anticipation of Macworld ‘06… and today did not disappoint! Though I seriously considered skipping lunch to watch the webcast, I made myself wait until the afternoon. Whoa! What did I see when I went to apple.com but the word ‘Intel’ right on the front page! As I’m sure you know, Apple previously announced last June that it would be transitioning its computers to the Intel x86 platform starting in the middle of this year. Even though the rumor sites had claimed that this would happen earlier, it was still a bit of a surprise to see new Intel machines right at the beginning of the year.

The most wanted Intel upgrade, the PowerBook, has now been repackaged into the MacBook pro, and sports a dual core “Core Duo” processor. Apple claims that the new powerboo… I mean, MacBook pro (how many of us will really get used to that?) is nearly 4 times the speed of the PowerBook G4. We’ll just have to see about that as the new notebooks ship in February…

Another thing I’m eager to see is how well Rosetta emulation turns out to be. I’m not planning on buying an Intel mac until late 2006 at the earliest, but it will be interesting how well things turn out for up-to-the-minute buyers…