Intel-based Mac

Now that Apple computers have started using Intel chips, is it time for business to replace their Windows PCs with MACs? May be not, at least for short term.

One of the reasons Steve jobs has decided to go with Intel is the more limited supply of PowerPC than Intel's Pentium processors, as well as temperature issue on PowerPC. Currently, x86 processor families have very good performance, comparable to high performance RISC processors, although these x86 CPUs are still considered CISC.

For Apple users, the migration news is all good: The new computers using Intel's Core Duo dual-core chips offer two to five times the performance of previous Apple computers and Apple is selling their PCs for the same price as its older, slower computers (based on G4/G5).

I have compared performance between the PowerPC-based MAC and Pentium-4 based PC in term of performance and quality of graphic, Apple is still the winner. The performance is somehow is higher on Apple, I think this is something to do with the Unix-based O/S (Mac X) instead of patch-and-stitch Windows. The Mac X was designed from ground-up with ease-to-use and performance in mind, while Windows XP is more or less inherits the nightmare of Windows 95 and NT. Not to mention that Mac X is also more secure.

Another beauty of Mac is its consistency. All the shortcuts are consistent and work the same throughout all applications, while on Windows this is not the case. Linux, in this case, is the worst. Commands on vi, for instance, mostly are different than emacs, etc. Another beauty of Mac is truely PnP feature. With Windows, we still have to spend some time to click here-there to make a device work. Forget that in Apple World!

Now, more and more commodity products are being used by Mac. From standard USB, graphic card, hard drive and now the CPU itself. I expect price on Mac will go down a bit because of this (unless Mr. Jobs wants to be mega billionaere).

I think, soon people will develop some kind of emulator to run Windows-based applications (sort of WINE in Linux), and guess what? more customers change their religion to MAC.