Comments on: What Happen to the “Intel Snail” Apple Once Warned About?

By: TOS

TOS — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 05:10:48 +0000

These day, all computers are fast- PCs and Macs. I don’t make my decision based only on speed. I prefer Mac for the operating systems ease of use, and find Windows a pain. But as to the Intel chips running OS X better: not yet. At least mine isn’t. OS X runs smoother on my G4 tower, my wife’s iBook G4, and my G5 at work. My new Intel iMac is slow to wake up from the screen saver, has frozen completely more like a PC than a Mac, and has annoying text gliches when scrolling through Safari. I don’t want to dis my new computer. I love it, and I have no doubt these bugs will be worked out eventually. So anyhow. Um. Yeah. What was my point again?

By: Sven

Sven — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 02:57:59 +0000

Brad, Apple went to Intel and Steve Jobs himself admitted last year that OS X has ran on the Intel chips since day one. Reports are the Intel chips ran it better.

By: Sam

Sam — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 02:00:50 +0000

Things change. There was a time when the PowerPC 604 was the fastest thing out there. The G4 was darn impressive when it first came out. The fact that half the Macs Apple were selling STILL had a G4 in them years later is telling. Intel caught up and went past. Luckily they stopped and gave us a lift.

By: Brad

Brad — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 01:35:16 +0000

In its day both the G4 and G5 blew the doors off of the intel Pentium line. Now intel has approached apple and said lets build beautiful chips and computers together. The new line is a much different line than the Pentium. Lower power higher output per Watt. Apple is flexible enought to move to a new chipset… If something else came along that was better it would be easy for them to do it again.. As for Microsoft well.. they will continue to build bloatware that doesn’t run well on anyones hardware. Apple and the Macintosh are beautiful things.

By: artfull

artfull — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:18:52 +0000

Of course it is marketing … what is the point of this story?

Snail add is from the time of PowerPC G3 which was at least as fast as hideous intel 2. (in fact it was superior in most ways) Today Power PC G5 is as fast as any intel chip … even in native applications newest intel dual core chip is aprox. 20-50% faster than single core G5 (over two years old). Also intel is 32 bit, while G5 is 64 bit.

If apple used dual core G5, situation would have been worse for newest of intel.

The point is, both chip architectures have certain strong and weak points (Xbox 2, PS 3, Game Cube and Revolution etc are all using Power PC chips now, why if pentiums are faster?)

But marketing can always try to be creative, everyone does that, not just Apple.

But who cares, the point is that apple has better OS and finer hardware today, and even not yet released vista is still worse than current MacOS. That is the point that you should care for.