My thoughts are that Apple will continue on its current path of reducing price and emphasising compact packaging. So I imagine if an Intel iBook appears in January it will be priced well under $1,000 and be rather bare-featured. The current iBook is loaded with features, many of which cheap (and even not-so-cheap) Windows-based laptops eliminate to reduce costs. For example, my girlfriend's very expensive Dell laptop doesn't have a built-in microphone, a must for Skype. Apple shouldn't try to compete with $500 laptops because that would necessarily mean giving up the Apple traits of small size and quality materials, but a $750 iBook would attract a lot of people who would baulk at spending $1,000 on a laptop. Such people do not care about what processor their computer has or whether it has a FireWire port. They care about price and what the thing looks like compared to others sitting in the shop window. So a true entry-level iBook could sacrifice a lot of features to target this market.
Intel's Pentium M, while a great processor, is also very expensive. With Freescale's inexpensive G4 Apple can't buy a high-performance processor for love or money. That will change with the Pentium. Intel specifies a price of $702/chip for 1000 top-of-the-range Centrino processors. Obviously that chip won't be chosen for a $700 laptop, but neither will the cheapest Centrino at $267. So I think there is a real chance Apple's first Intel system will be based on the crap Celeron M processor.
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