New Macs, new numbers, Intel arrives
And now, the most delayed MacWorld recap for online publication. Everyone has by now heard about the new Apple Intel Macs, featuring top-of-the-line Intel dual-core chips. The iMac system is shipping now, and the laptop, named the Macbook Pro, will start shipping next month. The other big news is that Apple sold over 30 million iPods last year, and 14 million over the holiday quarter. New versions of iLife and iWork debuted (see iWeb entry), but the big news is Apple shipping Intel Macs 6 months early, and moving the entire product line to Intel before the end of the year. I expect, however, that the Xserves will remain G5 for some time. New versions of some apps will be required for the new machines, but most apps are either already “Universal” or will run just fine under Rosetta, OS X’s emulation framework. A lot of people are wondering about Windows bootability on the new machines. The new Macs use EFI instead of BIOS, so booting windows will require either a EFI version of Windows, or at least someone hacking up an Windows bootloader for EFI. Nothing has happened so far. Honestly, I expect an bootable Windows by the end of the month. In other Apple news, the iTMS should be hitting 1 Billion songs sold sometime in February.