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As the end of the year approaches and the rest of the western world turns its attention to the Festive Season and what Santa may leave in their stocking, we Mac user's look beyond December to Apple's traditional big product announcement at Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

This year, the smart money, if that's the correct term for a bunch of analyst's predictions, is on the first Intel Mac. The reasoning is persuasive. Apple has already said that the move to Intel will begin in 2006, and it is reasonable to assume that having had his fingers burned by the promise of a 3GHz Power Mac in 2004, CEO Steve Jobs would choose to be conservative in his public scheduling. So if he is confident enough to say the transition will begin in the middle of next year, Apple must be on track to launch something at the beginning of the year. That way, even if there is a catastrophic slippage, Apple can still meet its public timetable. Right? Maybe.

We are also told the version of Mac OS X for Intel has made significant improvements in speed and runs well in tests on Intel PCs: the OSx86 Project claims it now matches the PowerPC version feature for feature. And apparently Apple has Intel versions of its iLife applications ready to go.

Beyond that, the logic gets a bit sketchier. Intel CEO Paul Otellini is due to give a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on 5 January, four days before the start of Macworld Expo. He is expected to use his speech to talk about Yonah, Intel's next-generation processor and one that could be used in

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the Mac. Does that provide evidence of a January launch for an Intel Mac? I don't think so. Even if Otellini does make the short hop from Vegas to San Francisco and stand on stage beside Jobs, it will not necessarily be to announce the launch of a new Intel Mac. They may jointly demo a Mac running OS X on a Yonah chip, but that is a long way short of announcing a new product.

So much for the reasoning in favour of a January launch, what about the evidence against? I think it stands up more robustly to scrutiny. We've heard recently from Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen that porting his company's applications to OS X on Intel is a greater challenge than Jobs makes out. Reading between the lines of his comments, it's hard to come to any other conclusion than it will be the second half of next year before we see Intel versions of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator et al. And if Adobe is finding it a challenge, just imagine how Quark is dealing with the transition. Microsoft isn't on the cusp of launching an OS X Intel version of its products, either.

We know from the moves to PowerPC and OS X that having key applications available on Day One is critical to the sales of the new machines. Sure, you could run existing applications under emulation, but what is the point upgrading to a new machine just to run the same applications with an emulation layer between them and the OS?

Apple may well have native versions of iLife, and maybe even some of its professional applications ready to go, but, Logic, Shake and Final Cut Pro still represent a relatively small part of its user base.

There would be benefits to a January launch, of course. It would attract a huge amount of publicity and potentially persuade even more people to switch from PC to Mac. In fact, the potential of an Intel Mac mini - the machine most likely to be the first to switch - to be the catalyst for a tidal wave of PC users moving to the Mac is seen by many as the biggest benefit of an early launch. And as owners of the Mac mini and iBook often don't use applications beyond those shipped with their machine, the lack of third-party software wouldn't be a big problem.