“As some consider the implications of 14 years of OS X, what about over nine years of Intel Inside? It also boggles the mind, especially considering how Intel and Microsoft were once regarded as one humongous competitor,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “The term ‘WinTel’ was the common reference to a Windows PC with Intel parts, although AMD processors were also used.”
“As we entered the 21st century, Apple had long since settled in on the PowerPC. The Intel Pentium ran hot and was underpowered for its processor speeds, which ranged up to 4GHz,” Steinberg writes. “In those days, it was common for Apple to stage bake-offs between a Mac with PowerPC against an Intel-based PC with a much higher clock speed. Running such benchmarks as Adobe Photoshop rendering functions, the Mac was almost invariably considerably faster. At the time, with Apple’s testing protocols at hand, I ran the very same tests and achieved comparable results. So when people complained that Apple was faking it, I was able to say that I knew the tests were genuine.”
“But the situation changed for the worse. Freescale Semiconductor, spun off from Motorola, along with IBM, decided to focus more on building chips for embedded markets. Sales to Apple were relatively few and thus improvements to the PowerPC were few and far between. Despite protests to the contrary, Macs really began to fall behind in absolute performance, particularly on PowerBooks,” Steinberg writes. “The first Intel-based Macs were announced at the Macworld Expo in January 2006, and, by summer, the migration was over, way ahead of schedule.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We went back to reread what we wrote back in June 2005 when Apple announced the switch to Intel. Here are a couple of snippets:
• Oh, so one could buy a Mac and run both Windows and Mac OS X or buy a Dell and only be able to run Windows. Muahahahahah! So, can anyone explain why would anyone in their right mind would buy a Dell or any other Wintel box assembler’s kit again? This is shaping up to become a “license Mac OS X or die” problem for the Dells of the world. But, what if Steve Jobs doesn’t feel like licensing Mac OS X? Checkmate. Is it too early to suggest that Michael Dell shut down the company and give the money back to shareholders?
Wait until Wall Street figures this one out. — MacDailyNews Take, June 8, 2005
• These Intel-based Macs will help expand Mac market share, if average people can be made to understand that the machines can run both Windows and Mac operating systems natively. Remember, it’s a good bet most of these average people (we’re probably talking somewhere around 70-80% of personal computer consumers) don’t even know what an operating system is; they think Windows is a personal computer; you know, the ones who think the “blue e” is the “Internet.” For most people, Macs will become the “2 for the price of 1″ computer. Even for the nearly illiterate personal computer buyers, with a little Apple-supplied education via marketing, it would make little sense to buy a limited Windows-only machine from the box assemblers like Dell, Gateway, etc. Give them their “Windows Insecurity Blanket” upfront and they’ll throw it away themselves after they realize how tattered and threadbare it is in comparison it to Apple’s Mac OS X.
The only question left would be: now how do we get them to boot into Mac OS X instead of Windows? The best answer for Apple would be to have the machines always boot up into Mac OS X and allow a “Virtual-PC-like” way to run Windows and Windows apps (but, natively, with no emulation speed hit, thanks to the Intel processor).
One more thing… don’t overlook the enterprise ramifications. It may just get a whole lot easier to justify Apple Macs at work. — SteveJack, MacDailyNews, June 10, 2005