Over at Business Week, Stephen H. Wildstrom deals with an interesting question: Buy or Wait?:
“What is your assessment of buying an early version of a laptop with that chip, vs. waiting a few months? What is the likelihood there will be bugs to work out? Will Vista be functional with inadequate graphics resources?
Wildstrom thinks that you can’t judge how well Microsoft’s Vista will run on current Intel 945 Mobile Graphics systems right now, because it’s in beta, and because it’s constantly being tweaked, although he points out that Intel says it will run Vista once Vista ships. He also mentions that the Core Duos will be priced aggressively against current platforms, which is good news if you do decide to go ahead and wait for a Core Duo system (several have already been announced).
I think at this point, it’s more of a feature set issue for many of us, rather than a CPU issue. Some of the smaller form factors that people prefer may only be able to handle the single core version of the new Intel platform.