Apple Inc (AAPL)

[langostino]

"tend to sell to professional users"

yep, with Apple having flushed the mid-level customer out of towers, that's very true, and your point is well-taken with respect to those customers.

I agree, there would be a very, very small fraction of current G5 tower owners who would buy a Pentium D class tower now and rely on Rosetta. Next to none.

But that buyer profile only represents half of the tower's original constituency. I'm talking about serving the other half, and the stimulative effect it would have on overall sales. Incrementally additive to the tune of 10%-15% of total Mac CPU sales.

Even with Rosetta's limitations, a reasonably priced mid-level tower with dual-core Pentium D class at 2x 2.8-3.4 Ghz would blow the doors off the current desktops of those pro-sumers and others who bought the mid-market SKU of PowerMac G4s from 2000-2004. That is a fairly huge upgrade market's worth of sales.