Yesterday Steve Jobs announced that the new Intel based Macs would start shipping this month, nearly 6 months earlier than previously expected. Jobs claimed that the new Macs are 2 to 3 times faster than the current generation of Macintosh computers. And at a starting price of about $1300, it looks like the new Macs will be no bargain.
It shouldn’t be any surprise that the Intel based Macs will still command the price premium that has always been associated with Macs. You can bet that in addition to greater performance, Apple is probably getting cpus from Intel at a lower cost than they were from IBM. Even a small per cpu savings would mean much larger profits for Apple on each computer if retail prices remained the same. They can hawk greater performance for the same cost to the Mac faithful. And in what is really the only thing that surprised me a bit, the new Macs will be free to run Microsoft Windows if people want to. I doubt many will chuck Mac OS X for Windows, but some may want to set it up as a dual boot option. The Intel based Macs then become an option for anyone who needs/wants to run the variety of other OSs that currently run on Intel based PCs. It should be easier to code Windows emulators for OS X now that the underlying hardware is Windows compatible too.
So, lower costs, plus same retail prices, plus some new customers, equal mo money mo money mo money for Apple! No wonder Steve Jobs is smiling.