Costing billions is never a great thing. And from the looks of this article, that switch to Intel could in fact be a major mistake.

“Letters Did Apple make an expensive mistake by announcing a switch to Intel, and a year-long wait for the first hardware? According to a survey of Register readers, Apple faces a sales chill that could cost it billions of dollars. Hundreds of emails have poured in - one every minute over the past thirty hours - representing an impressive cross section of our more than 3 million monthly readers across the globe,” Andrew Orlowski reports for The Register.

“More than half of you said the Intel announcement will have a negative impact on your private or corporate purchasing decisions with the lack of Intel hardware being particularly harshly felt amongst current and potential PowerBook users. Many users who had been holding off for a G5 will wait for the juicy Pentium-M roadmap that Jon Stokes outlines at Ars Technica today, here,” Orlowski reports. “It’s hardly a scientific sample, we stress, but it may be even worse than it looks on the surface.” [Read the rest]