“Right now, Apple is growing 40% year-over-year while using PowerPC-based hardware. While they may not win the GHz speed wars, they do win on looks, overall performance, reliability, functionality, and elegance,” Dan Knight writes for LowEndMac. “Now imagine Apple offering a dual-core 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 system that has the looks and elegance of the Power Mac G5. Further imagine that Microsoft, never one to overlook an opportunity to sell Windows, ports Virtual PC to OS X on Intel. No more CPU emulation, so Windows on a Macintel computer should be close to the performance on a dedicated Windows PC.”
“Do you see the potential to bring in switchers who won’t need to leave their Windows apps behind? It’s huge! Unless Apple really botches things, Intel-based Macs will have the same stability OS X users are used to, and clock speed will be directly comparable with Windows computers. Factor in Virtual PC, and Apple could quickly rise to 10% market share,” Knight writes. “Another benefit of putting OS X on Intel is that Apple could produce a fully interactive OS X demo that would run from a CD (or, more likely, DVD) on standard Wintel hardware and lets current Windows users try OS X without investing in new hardware.”
“Because Microsoft owns Virtual PC, they shouldn’t see any threat at all from Apple moving to Intel. In fact, because Mac users tend to buy more software than Windows users, Microsoft may come out ahead. More than that, Apple should come out well ahead of where they are today. I suspect they’ll be #2 behind Dell by the time the entire line has switched to Intel CPUs,” Knight writes. “And with the growth, we’ll see an even more diverse range of Macintosh computers. Perhaps an ultralight portable, a quad processor Power Mac, and a DIY Power Mac for geeks that lets them choose their own CPU, hard drive, video card, etc.”
Full article here.
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Intel-based Macs running both Mac OS X and Windows will be good for Apple – June 10, 2005