Tired yet? If you’re irritated that my material here looks and reads nothing like a blog, be comforted; this isn’t a blog, and I’m not a blogger. Adjust your antenna accordingly.The unnatural contortions that Apple had to go through in order to unveil Intel Macs “early” at Macworld Expo (it was not early to my mind–it was either now or Summer, and Intel’s striking Apple’s segment then) are reflected in a high wire dance that’s still underway. I sat down with the Apple marketing VPs for hardware and software Wednesday, and much of the x86 Mac strategy still has a moving target feel to it. Some bits are nailed down, in particular, the pieces that Apple figured consumers would care most about. I’ll start with hardware. These x86 machines, and those for the foreseeable future, are 32-bit boxes. The fact that Apple chose a target market that doesn’t care about 32 vs 64 makes Apple’s plans pretty clear. It’s too bad those plans weren’t made clear in Apple’s otherwise stellar documentation.The x86 iMac and the MacBook Pro are very similar machines; they’re meant to be. Apple designed them for well-heeled consumers, although, as you’ll read in a follow-up entry, Apple’s Pro Tools will land on these boxes in March. That’ll be a feat. MacBook Pro and iMac are strictly 32-bit boxes. The way they’re constructed, the Intel Core Duo CPU is practically incidental to the design, a director of traffic. Apple doesn’t agree with that assessment, but disagreement is essential in heathy relationships. The magic, the place where the ass that all Macs must kick get kicked, is the ATI X1600 Radeon (or Mobility Radeon). PCI-Express, 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM, space warping graphics processing unit. I don’t kneel before it in a workstation or even a deep-pocketed enthusiast’s overclocked game box. But this GPU lifts these Macs out of Intel mediocrity. I knew Apple’s warmed-over chassis design and “poke a stick in Intel OEMs’ eyes” advertising wouldn’t do it. So ATI gets all the huzzahs from me on this one.Little known fact: Apple software engineers choose, within applications, which graphical tasks will run through the GPU as lists and which will just spray onto the screen as plain old pixels in a frame buffer. In early Macs, the Dock animation had to be done with the GPU, but in later models, the CPU took over. It’s still that way: Developers can switch GPU/CPU/GPU, wherever the job is done best. Apple still has some of those decisions to work out. There were jerky bits in all of the animations demonstrated to me. I have great hopes for 10.4.5.Apple warned me off seeing the slow CPU/killer GPU design as a bellwether of Macs to come. It appears to me that MacBook Pro is having power management problems; with that beastly GPU, I’m not surprised. The demo unit was blazing hot at the rear, highlighting the no-free-lunch policy in electrical design. A much cooler CPU, but much slower, too. A fast bus to RAM, but the speed kicks in only after you install two sticks whose specs match exactly. The 667 MHz front-side bus heats things up, the worst offender has got to be the killer PCI-Express GPU. The bottom of the machine was intolerably hot. We don’t have PowerPC to blame that on any more.MacBook Pro is a 15-inch PowerBook chassis, with a tiny bit more and less. Apple added two tenths of a diagonal inch to the display, shaved a few hundredths of an inch from its closed height, and kept the weight to within a few fractions of a pound compared to its PowerPC cousin (which MacBook Pro does not replace, at least not yet). The MacBook Pro’s display is stupid bright (in a good way), with Apple’s intent being to match the MacBook Pro’s display brightness to its Cinema Display for more seamless dual-headed operation. Odd. There aren’t even that many professional Mac owners running dual displays, and certainly not on notebooks. Why did Apple take such care to do external display matching for what it calls a consumer notebook?They don’t call ’em Cinema Displays for nothing, bub. Wait and see. Even the iMac has an HDVI jack on the back.The little touches for which Apple is famous have gotten a bit thinner, but they’re still welcome. The 15-inch MacBook Pro’s trackpad is now the size of the 17-inch PowerBook’s, giving that huge space below the keyboard a purpose. Apple says they’re the MacBook Pros speakers are the same as on the 15-inch PowerBook I have. I like the 15’s speakers better than the 17’s. They have a lot more clarity. Both iMac and MacBook Pro have infrared receiver ports on the front. MacBook Pro’s is next to the lid release, and iMac is cleverly hidden behind the Apple logo. iSight, in its way, defined the new, futuristic Mac, so attuned to its users that PC users felt ashamed. The auto focus, auto exposure iSight is gone, and in its place is a face-level color pinhole camera. Steve Jobs gave it the bum’s rush on stage; having cohort Phil Schiller pop up from the audience, spin around a couple of times and sit down before anybody noticed how poor the quality was.I can understand. Apple’s been awfully busy with work it couldn’t bring to the show: Front Row is to be the focal point of new design. Point the slim, white remote at an iMac or a MacBook Pro and the machine goes into set top box mode. It’s very pretty, very easy, and it can all be driven without touching the keyboard or the mouse. Arrows spin a lazy susan of large icons. You one-click into DVD, music, pictures, whatever. It’s there as a placeholder, handy candy. When you see it in Apple’s next x86 system, Front Row will look a good deal prettier.For rank and file consumers, these first x86 Macs are $1,300 previews of classy home entertainment boxes that will hit in the Summer and Fall, coinciding with Intel’s own massive, multi-partner Viiv entertainment hub initiative, and Microsoft’s Windows Media 11/Vista/Plays For Sure full-court press into desktops, set tops, DVRs, music/video players, mobile phones and wherever Windows Embedded can fit (everywhere). It’ll all be in Apple’s face. It’s funny; if Apple had chosen AMD, Apple wouldn’t have to defend itself from its main ally. It was embarrassing for Steve to get pushed on stage with no commercial x86 software. Not even sexy shareware or freeware. Developers and exhibitors were blind-sided. They paid $999 for lease systems with very fast CPUs and atrocious graphics. Now that’s flipped, and coders, though grateful for a one-to-one trade to an iMac, are faced with taking apps back to the drawing board. Now that Apple’s on Intel’s roadmap, just like Dell, Apple’s tightly-held product schedule will be much easier to predict. I called new systems at Macworld Expo based on Intel’s roadmap, but made the error that I expected home entertainment systems would hit first, followed by high end. I like it better this way, and Apple’s software VP summed it up nicely: “We tell our engineers to work on systems that are exactly like those in customers’ hands.”Apple’s failure to do that left Steve Jobs with nothing outside Apple’s line to show but an embarrassingly slow copy of Photoshop running under the Rosetta emulator. Apple calls it an instruction translator. I call it an abomination, albeit a necessary one. Secrets make for fun marketing, but developers don’t like surprises. More about that soon. I’ve got a plane to catch.Thanks for reading. Software Development