an antimac movement &A#JD1Tg!d8!' 2745

Now now, settle down.

Sadly Apple's move turns out to be a good idea. IBM screwed up big time. They hit a speed wall with the G5, the haven't bothered to put out a power efficient version that is usable in laptop, they left Apple quite clearly in the lurch.

With the advent of Universal Binary programming Apple is able to dump, retain, jump back to PowerPC processors any time they like. It may happen! Nowhere have I read anything about Apple having an exclusive contract with Intel. Apple could move to AMD (who have far better 64 bit processors than Intel) if they liked!

So this opens up options. Mac laptop users get a whopping speed increase over ye olde G4 chips. Macintel machines get both dual booting of Windows as well as hardware accelerated virtualization of any OS that can run on x86 hardware. (See my regularly updated thread "Virtualization Arrives For Macintel").

Tower Mac users gain NOTHING. Intel chips have zero speed advantage over top end G5 chips. AND all the professional software runs on G5 natively. As usual Adobe and Quark etc. are dragging their feet. The bigger the company the slower to change, except if you're Apple apparently.

I have listed all the possible options Apple may have regarding tower Macs in previous threads, so I won't bother here. But I will say that the best option off my list was moving the towers over to Intel Core Quad chips, whenever they come out. That may well not be for another year and a half for all I know. A Mac tower with double Intel Core Quad chips would be ripping. The Intel roadmap suggests going beyond quad as well.

So be not so glum my friend. Things are looking up.

;-D

-- Fortune Magazine, 11-29-05: What's your computer setup today? Frederick Brooks: I happily use a Macintosh. It's not been equalled for ease of use, and I want my computer to be a tool, not a challenge. Frederick Brooks is the author of 'The Mythical Man Month'. He spearheaded the movement to modernize computer software engineering in 1975