So Apple updated the MacBook Pros about a month or so ago with Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors and the Thunderbolt ports.  I will say, a guy at my work purchased one (his first Apple Computer purchase ever sans iPods) and has been blown away by the speed and processing power inside of the laptop.

This laptop was replacing a desktop tower computer in his house that he used for video editing and media center functionality.  Other than the learning curve of a completely new operating system, paried with his misunderstanding of how iTunes works as an application (I’ve been helping out alot in those area) he has loved it.  It wasn’t until we were working to encode some digital movies he had into a format that would play on his 5th generation iPod that I realized the speed of this processor.

He was able to completely re-encode this movie, getting from point A to point B, in less than 7 minutes.  In comparison, my computer at home would take around an hour to do the same task.  Mine is an iMac 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo machine with 3GB of RAM.  Once I saw this, I knew that my current iMac would have to be replaced by a machine running the new Intel processor architecture.

So, now I ask Apple, how long will I be waiting for this iMac to be released… (and after that, how long before Thunderbolt hard drives become avaiable at decent prices)