Apple to delay Merom notebooks

SOURCES DEEP within Intel tell us everything is going swimmingly for the new MCW cores, but Apple won't produce a laptop with Merom until 2007. The delay is most likely due to a convergence of two things, production and Apple's limited range.

Intel has said that MCW, nee Core 2^2 the second, will hit about 20% of their production on new years eve, but what they don't offer up is the split for M/C/W. Unless you have had your head buried in the sand, you know that Woodcrest is getting the lion's share of production, over 70% of Xeons will be new. Conroe is next in line with 20+%, followed by a syphilitic trickle of Meroms. The keen among you will notice that these proportions are in relation to the pain Intel feels from AMD.

So, said trickle means that you don't put the few Meroms you get in anything but the highest end lowest volume models of your lineup. If you have a dozen models, you might pick one to be graced by the new wondercore. If you are Apple with two or four models, depending on how you count, then you can't really get enough to supply even one model.

What this means is Apple is faced with putting out laptops that have cases made of real unobtanium, or they can wait and roll it out right. Since it is mole migration season, I have been asking many of the little critters streaming past my house, and they all say that iMeromBooks are a 2007 product. µ