Give me a break. Some of the statements I’ve read in recent days about whether the latest refresh of the Power Mac line is worth your attention seem downright silly. They usually go like this, and I’m not singling out any specific person for criticism here, but: Apple is moving to Intel beginning next year. It won’t be long before even today’s Power Mac is long in the tooth, so why spend a bundle on one?

Besides, gas is expensive and the family SUV drinks a gallons and gallons of it while you’re out doing your daily chores. You have to have priorities, and maybe you could live with your present Mac workstation a year or two longer. If lots of people feel this way, it may well be that the Power Mac G5 Quad will fail big time in the marketplace. Or maybe buy a compact car, so they have enough money left over to acquire that new Mac after all.

Does any of this make sense to you?

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Despite the misleading spin about what Steve Jobs really said to explain Apple’s move to Intel chips, let’s take him at his word, which is more than sufficient to raise some fascinating possibilities. We’re talking about lower power chips with greater performance than what IBM could offer, and that includes those new dual-core chips.

But what will that mean in the real world? Well, you can glean a few clues from unofficial reports from Mac developers who have paid $999 to lease the Developer Transition Kit, which includes a Power Mac with a Pentium 4. Even though the statements aren’t officially confirmed, we hear about a more responsive Mac OS X user interface. Of course, now that cat is out of the bag about Apple’s stealth project of developing an Intel version simultaneously with the PowerPC version, you have to wonder. Why would it seem snappier under an Intel chip that the PowerPC supposedly “smokes” it various and sundry application benchmarks?

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Although it makes plenty of money from the Windows platform, Adobe’s home has always been the Mac, where graphic artists still depend on Photoshop as a primary tool for image editing. While that situation may not change any time soon, the arrival of an apparent rival, Apple’s Aperture, may move things in a totally unexpected direction.

Over the years, long before Aperture arrived, there had been rumors that Apple might just be working on an application to compete with Photoshop, in the same fashion that Final Cut Pro competed with Adobe Premiere. The end result was that Adobe discontinued the Mac version of Premiere. Of course, some folks in the film editing business tell me that development of Premiere had languished and that the arrival of Apple’s application was a blessing.

But Photoshop isn’t languishing, so where does Aperture fit in? Should Adobe fear that Apple will cherry pick its most popular applications and build competitors? Well, for now at least, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Aperture lacks many of the features that graphic artists take for granted in Photoshop, such as its paint tools. Instead, Aperture is designed strictly as a “post-production tool for photographers.”

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While everyone looks to the iPod as Apple’s biggest innovation ever, it’s the small things that count. When the iMac appeared in 1998, the biggest criticism focused on what it lacked, and that was the floppy drive and SCSI port. Cynics might suggest it was a cost-cutting move at the time, but Apple’s decision to embrace a PC peripheral port, USB, began a trend that eventually encompassed the entire computer industry.

Of course it took a while for Apple to deliver a suitable replacement for floppies, one with more resiliency and more capacity, and that was a CD burner. In fact, Apple was late to the party with the standard CD burner. You can, by the way, still by an external floppy drive for your Mac if you have a spare $30. But Apple was the first computer maker to tell you that it was time to move on to something better.

SCSI? Well, it’s still available for professional users, but lots of them have since moved on to FireWire.

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