This article has the best headline I’ve read regarding the new Macs with Intel processors
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/14/BUG70GN6MS1.DTL
The article makes one good point, that the average consumer doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about the guts of their computer.
I would argue that by and large most people might even be a little scared of what’s inside. (I replaced a hard drive in an ibook for a colleague once. I still have nightmares…so many screws)
I think the benefits of having standard processors are mostly Apple’s. Lower cost, better performance (which makes it easier to market machines to would-be switchers), and possibly maybe more software ported more quickly.
Long time Apple customers will no doubt enjoy the new found peppy-ness of their upgraded machines. But that’s the sort of thing you get used to real fast. I don’t remember feeling like my old G3 Powerbook was slow, until I got my G4 Powerbook. I was just accustomed to the experience.
A lot of the buzz surrounding this (fairly minor) Apple hardware strategy shift has been the debate of whether it will be possible to run Windows on your Mac.
People chime in about EFI vs BIOS and VMWare vs Virtual PC. People mention gaming, and those mysterious “Windows only” applications that a mac user must need from time to time. (If you’re livelihood relies on a particular piece of software, running on a particular machine, you buy the machine(s) that you need. That dichotomy doesn’t really exist)
And then journalists will often chime in “But if you’re buying a Mac why would you want to run Windows anyway?” This tacitly implies that there’s no good reason to run Windows anyway. Subtle journalistic Mac snobbery (fun for the whole family).
The reason it’s important for Macs to run Windows (either in some dual boot arrangement , or in a virtual machine of some kind) is for software and web site development.
Apple has two main demographics which they target. The “rest of us” and serious (read: high paid professional) “creative types”.
The “rest of us” are “regular” customers who like to pay for quality and design and prize (apparent) simplicity over availability or interoperability. (the truth is, a modern Mac with it’s modern Unix based OS is every bit as complicated as anything else out there – it’s just better thought out).
My parents are “the rest of us”
Serious creative types used to be mainly artists, graphic designers, film makers, musicians, writers, teachers, etc. That definition has been expanded now to include software developers.
There is a small but significant minority of developers out there using Mac OS X. The Ruby On Rails people are from 37 Signals. Big mac users (watch the demo movies for RoR — TextMate on Mac OS X)
Jeffery Zeldman of A List Apart fame, big old Mac user. There are plenty of others.
So, back to the point? Software developers and web site developers benefit greatly from having multiple platforms at their disposal.
On the Mac you have the Mac OS — but you also have Unix, so you have Apache, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, MySQL, Postgres, Firebird, and SQLite pretty much out of the box, On Windows you have Java, ASP, .Net, and ColdFusion (ick). (To be fair, of course you can develop in Ruby, MySQL, etc on Windows too, but these environments are far more “at home” in a Unix like system than a Windows system)
For a developer, especially a developer who deploys on the web, having one box which supports all of this is a godsend.
So that’s “so what”
