Apple Planning Intel iBook Debut for January?

axonis writes "Apple is planning to release its first entry-level iBook laptops with Intel processors next January at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, highly reliable sources have confirmed to Think Secret." From the article: "Apple will almost certainly tap Intel's forthcoming Yonah processor for the iBooks, a successor to the company's Pentium M. It is unknown whether Apple will go with a dual-core version of the processor, slated for release in January, or a single-core version, which Intel announced in August would be delivered shortly after the dual-core version. The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks."

Comments

The funny thing is it could be a huge Apple win

[SuperKendall]

If it turns out people can easily pirate OS X to run on any Intel box (and there's no reason to think it will not be hacked as you say) then it could be a huge boon to Apple in terms of market share.

Lots of the Windows market share is from unathorized copies, if all the sudden a lot of people start running OS X, even on the sly, it means a very real increase in the number of people showing up in weblogs, in purchases of software (though probably not a lot since someone running a pirate OS can probably also get other software too), but most importantly in exposure to other people. The more people that run OS X the more people may think about buying Apple products because friends like the OS.

I don't think Appple will let resellers sell OS X anytime soon (too many support and quality hassles - the Dell OS X box might well be the ROKR of the Intel Mac world and Apple can't have that). But they can still get a boost from the inevitible pirating of the OS.