Crazy Apple! Crazier Mac kOOks. 1635

Actually, a 2 GHz Core Duo is about on par with a 2 GHz dual core G5, from the benchmarks I've seen. That makes it slower than the mid-range and high-end G5 tower models, and of course none of the Core Duo machines Apple sells support 16 GB of RAM, or high-end video cards, or multiple internal hard drives.

Yes, the new pro towers are going to be faster, but the jump probably won't be nearly as huge as the jump in the consumer space was, since dual core G5 chips are much more compebreastive with what's available in the x86 world than the single core G4 and G5 chips Apple previously used in its consumer machines.

Um. Your post seems to be predicated on the notion that a lot of Mac users believe it's a good idea to buy a G5 tower right now, and are in fact doing so. I would guess that this is not the case; that the towers aren't selling very well these days, and that those who are buying them are well aware of the issues involved and have made that choice for their own reasons. Perhaps, for instance, they want to delay their move to Intel as long as possible, to allow everything to settle down, so they want to buy the fastest PPC Mac they'll ever be able to get, to get them through the next two or three years. This isn't the path I plan to take, but there's nothing particularly irrational about it.

I'm not exactly sure what you'd have had Apple do. I guess they could have stopped selling G5 towers, but I don't see how that would have been to anyone's benefit; people who don't want G5 towers aren't hurt by their continued sale, and people who do want them obviously benefit from it.

They could have also mbuttively cut prices, I guess, but there are a couple of problems with that. First, just because Intel's chips let Apple make faster systems at lower prices, doesn't mean that G5 towers have gotten any cheaper to produce. As such, it's likely Apple couldn't cut prices too far without losing money. Second, Apple likes to maintain something like price continuity from generation to generation; they don't want the new Intel-based towers to cost lots more than the G5 towers they replace.

-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005