You guys realise how long this thread will be by April 2007?
We know that Merom is supposed to be Intel's mobile processor, so we should
be seeing Merom updates to Apple's notebook line-up from as soon as next week
to who knows when.
Somewhere between March and April Intel will update to Santa Rosa with a slighly
faster FSB and improved wireless specifications.
Along the way, we should also see performance per watt improvements in video cards.
For now, I don't think we'll see so much improvement in speed, but hopefully
we will see some slight improvements in efficiency and operating temperature.
The Penryn platform will be where it starts to get more interesting shrinking
down the Merom processors to 45 nm, but we're looking at earliest Q 2 or Q3 2007 before those chips become available.
The wild card in this will be competition with AMD's quad core processors and the
inevitable battle between Vista and Leopard.
Looking at the big picture, I'd have to say that 2007 will be the year of lab rats
and crash test dummies.
New processors, new wireless capabilties, new video cards and new operating systems all stack up to be one giant Rev "A"
This is why I strongly believe, it's best to buy conservatively, especially when it comes to notebooks.
Buy something to hold you over through the next 2 years without going nuts,
then take a look at what the market has to offer once 45 nm machines are mainstream.
You need to take a hard look at how much computer you really need to
get you through the immediate future, they buy accordingly.
