A few friends recently asked about whether or not they should buy a new MacBook Pro or wait a little longer for whatever’s coming next.

My first reaction, conditioned on years of Mac use and purchasing, was, “of course you should wait, there’s likely to be a new chip in the MacBook Pros any day now!”

I think I was wrong. Moreover, I think that whole line of thinking is finished.

We already know what the next chip in the MacBook Pros will be: The Core 2 Duo, probably running at 2.4 and 2.67ghz. None of this is a surprise, it’s all published on Intel’s Processor Roadmap and related documents.

Intel sticks to their roadmap. The roadmap doesn’t show any Core2 Duo chips in laptops before 2007. Despite the rumors, I’ll be surprised to see anyone shipping Core2 Duo laptops in quantity before Halloween (the actual first shopping day of the holiday season). Of course this is all speculation and I may be wrong.

The next CPU Intel designs will not make the previous model obsolete. They work on the principle of incremental progress. Mac users aren’t conditioned to understand incremental progress. Consider:

* The PPC blew away the 68k
* G3s crushed PPCs
* G4s ran circles around G3s
* The G5 was so hot it needed liquid cooling (and was faster than the G4s).
* The first Intel MacBook Pros were 5-10 times faster than the previous PowerBooks.

That kind of repeated beating gets you some learnin’. Thankfully, the days of imminent obsolescence are likely over.

The Core2 Duo is not radically better than the Core Duo. It is incrementally better, in some areas more than others. Compare the charts in this Core 2 Duo vs. Core Duo article on AnandTech. While some application tests do show a 10-15% performance improvement, most reveal 3–5%. Gaming Performance is almost identical between the chips. Also remember that a 10% speedup is equivalent to 0.2ghz of processor speed, something that tends to happen anyway between product cycles or could improve if you learn how to overclock amd fx 6300.

> **The performance difference here is not enough to justify an upgrade if you’re a Core Duo owner**, but for a first time buyer if prices are the same, the Core 2 Duo is simply the right choice.

Some in the higher nerd-echelons have realized the “shortcomings” of the Core 2 Duo and are already lusting after Intel’s next CPU, the mythical Santa Rosa platform. Me? I’m going to stop stressing about processors and enjoy my MacBook Pro for a while without worrying that it will be obsolete tomorrow.

Software however, that’s a whole other story…