In my last MacTek Talk column, I wrote about the reasons behind Apple's move to Intel, and while no one's sure what will be announced next month, one thing's for sure: Intel-based Macs are coming in 2006. This has prompted some interesting feedback from readers, and this installment of MacTek Talk will focus on some of the common questions and concerns.

One of the more frequent questions is about the fate of Apple's G5-based computers, specifically whether the G5 processor would ever make it into a PowerBook. My opinion: The G5 PowerBook is a dream that will never happen. Apple is, after all, transitioning to Intel's chips for a reason, and one of those reasons is the lack of portability of the G5s.

Even if those processors could operate within the small form factor laptops require, one would have to ask whether Apple would be wise to put engineering effort -- and dollars -- into a project that has already been rendered obsolete by the mere announcement of the Intel transition.

As for the fate of the Power Mac G5s, I believe they'll be around for a while during the transition phase. Developers will have to do a lot of work to bring their professional applications to the Mac/Intel platform. While Apple touts the ease of rebuilding application code for use on the x86 architecture, it's clear that results will vary.

The good news is that several developers have already documented successfully moving their products to Universal Binaries (that is, creating a single application that can run on both the PowerPC and x86 architectures). But history tells us that it will be a few updates before the code is fine-tuned enough to run well on any new platform, so there could be performance issues.