What remains to be seen is whether developers will charge for the time needed to make their applications Intel-compatible, as some did during the Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X transition. Will customers be willing to pay more money after spending so much on OS X-native applications just a few years ago?

Apple has come up with a contingency plan with Rosetta, a layer built into the Intel version of Mac OS X that allows programs written for the PowerPC platform to run on Intel-based Macs. While reports indicate that Apple has significantly increased the speed of applications running within Rosetta with the latest OS X for Intel releases, the bad news is that there is still a performance penalty.

This doesn't bode well for professionals who will be expecting performance increases when they buy new computers, and that's aside from the fact that it's generally a good idea to wait on purchasing the first revision of any new hardware or software -- just in case some bugs slip through unnoticed.

As a result, I think it's still very safe and very smart to purchase Apple's G5 Power Macs, especially the new Power MacQuad G5s. Apple isn't expected to drop support for its current Power Macs for at least the next few years, by which time it should be time to purchase new computers anyway.

Whether Apple will update the G5s beyond the current speeds remains to be seen. Because of the Rosetta-related performance hit and the time to market for most native applications, I expect Apple's professional line of computers will be the last of the PowerPC-based computers to make the move to Intel. While professionals want to squeeze as much performance out of their apps as possible, it's consumers who will be far more forgiving.