After the Core 2 Duo, what's next for Apple laptops?

It's always a bit of a delicate dance, running the laptop division at a computer company -- certainly at one that's as vertically integrated as Apple, and certainly when the next generation of the company's popular MacBook and MacBook Pro lines are being prepped for release.

You want to make a powerful, full-featured laptop, but not one that obviates your company's desktops. In the past, when competent CPUs ran large and hot, and solid graphics required large and dedicated boards, this wasn't much of an issue. But based on rumblings about Intel's new laptop CPUs and various low-power graphics solutions, we may be seeing the last signs of a tipping point -- to use a marketing term -- after which time laptops may be all most people need.

As Computerworld blogger Seth Weintraub has already pointed out, Intel's new Nehalem is near, even though it was recently rebranded as Core i7 and may have a model code-named Bloomfield (Note to Intel: We surrender! All the code names are too much!). And tech know-it-alls are drooling over the speedy goodness, as Seth outlines.

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