Quite a lot of my Mac programming friends having been jabbering on about the Osbourne effect, and saying things like: “well I was going to buy some new hardware, but now I’m going to wait”.

I don’t really get it to be honest.

Sure, if the Osbourne effect kicks in then it will hurt Apple, but there’s not much reason for it to kick in, other than a bunch of hand-wringing Mac developers creating a self-fullfilling prophesy.

When you look at what Apple have actually said, it’s just that at some point next year they will be releasing some products using Intel processors. They haven’t said when, and they haven’t said what.

They have said that they definitely won’t instantly be replacing their whole product line. By definition then they will continue to support PowerPC for a good while, and since the trend is towards processor independence, not away from it, it is unlikely that they are going to do something in the future which stops OS X from working on PowerPC.

So by buying a PowerPC machine now, you aren’t going to be left out in the cold in a year. Sure your machine will be a year older than next year’s model, and perhaps a little slower, but that would be equally true if next year’s model was PowerPC based. That’s always true, and one always has the dilemma of whether to wait a while or not, but I see nothing in this situation to make matters worse.

The Osbourne effect is based on the idea that the new product is going to be so vastly superior that there is absolutely no point buying the old one. Apple haven’t said that. One imagines that the machine will be a bit faster, but the real reason (at least the reason that Apple have stated publicly) for switching to Intel is that their long term roadmap is better, not that the current crop of chips totally blow away PowerPC chips.

For all we know, Apple’s first Intel based hardware might be a tablet, or a handheld, or something else that they don’t even make right now!

So what’s all the fuss about? If you need a new mac now, because your current one is too old/slow/noisy, then go out and buy one. If you don’t need one, then wait until you do.

As our Californian cousins might say: “like, duh…”.