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Originally Posted by juggernaut
Hey Cleo, not to steal UW topic but I have been wondering since I saw the ad. What do you think about MACs going with Intel chips?..
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The Intel Macs are really no different then the PowerPC Macs in actual use.
I setup one of the new 20" Intel Macs for one of my neighbor's girls the other day. Really fast. Came with some very kewl software from Apple, like Front Row. This is the first iMac to support an external monitor for an extended desktop. Before you had to buy either a Powerbook or a Tower for extended desktop support. Even has a built-in web cam. This machine would fill the needs of most users who want a desktop instead of a laptop.
The only downside to the new Intel Macs is not all the software has been ported over yet. It will run much of the old software in its built-in emulator at almost full speed but there is some issues with some software. I would expect before then end of the year pretty much everything, like the Adobe applications, to have been released native for the Intel Macs.
What will be very nice is when things like Wine and VMWare get released for the Intel Macs and you can do things like open Windows IE for testing your web pages inside of the Mac environment. Linux and other *nix already do this so it shouldn't be a big deal to release for the Mac since Macs are just another flavor of Unix.
The whole move to Intel seams to be going much more smoothly then back in 1992 when Macs went from the 6800 series processors to the PowerPC processors.
I'm planning to get the Mac Intel laptop later this year when Apple releases the 17" size. My 17" is three years old and showing its age. I'm guessing that will be around late summer. By that time just about all the software that I use will have also been released native.