“Sources deep within Intel tell us everything is going swimmingly for the new MCW cores, but Apple won’t produce a laptop with Merom until 2007. The delay is most likely due to a convergence of two things, production and Apple’s limited range,” Charlie Demerjian reports for The Inquirer.

Demerjian reports, “Intel has said that MCW, nee Core 2^2 the second, will hit about 20% of their production on new years eve, but what they don’t offer up is the split for M/C/W. Unless you have had your head buried in the sand, you know that Woodcrest is getting the lion’s share of production, over 70% of Xeons will be new. Conroe is next in line with 20+%, followed by a syphilitic trickle of Meroms.”

“So, said trickle means that you don’t put the few Meroms you get in anything but the highest end lowest volume models of your lineup. If you have a dozen models, you might pick one to be graced by the new wondercore. If you are Apple with two or four models, depending on how you count, then you can’t really get enough to supply even one model,” Demerjian reports.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Note: If this report is reliable (and there is some question as Core 2 Duo iMacs were released yesterday), then our best guess for Apple to debut Intel Core 2 Duo-powered notebooks would be Macworld Expo in San Francisco, January 8-12.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son" for the heads up.]

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