Advice on Buying a Mac Now
Posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 0:00.
For the hundredth time…
Question: Should I buy a Mac now or wait until Apple ships the Intellitosh (a.k.a. Mac with Intel)?
Answer: My advice for buying a computer has not changed with the Apple / Intel announcement.
If you need the computer now, buy it and buy the best machine you can afford.
Apple will continue to support PowerPC for the life of the machine (about 5 years) and beyond. The PowerPC architecture powers the entire installed user base of Macs still in use. Apple is encouraging software developers to ship software compiled for both PowerPC and Intel processors. Software developers want your money and are going to compile software for both platforms for this reason. Fortunately, Apple has made compiling software for both platforms easy for developers.
[...] I am an Apple Campus Rep and I love my job. I work tomorrow at Harvard and I know that I will be flooded with questions. They’re such awesome geeks over there. Will you be able to run Mac OS X on a Dell? Is Apple finally confessing that the PowerPC architecture has been inferior all along? Should I wait to buy a Mac until next year? (Edit: No, you shouldn’t.) These are critical questions that I cannot answer. [...]