From a NY Times Bestseller

[Michael Costolo]

On 7/11/06, Christopher Chisholm <christopher.chisholm at syamsoftware.com> wrote:
>
> I'm sure with a quick google I could easily find this out, but... the
> Intel processors that Macs are using; are they just a regular x86
> pentium?  or are they actually a different architecture?

They're using dual core versions, and yes on x86.

> I guess what I'm really wondering, are modern Macs just PCs with fancy
> cases?

What computers aren't these days?

> To me, Apple appears to be very good at marketing, and very average at
> building systems.

Controlling their hardware has allowed them to do things generally
unavailable to the WinTel world.  I've seen that WinTel manufacturers
can drop in the latest greatest Pentium chip but still have their
hands tied with the front side bus speed.  The Macs, particularly on
their higher end machines, have had significantly faster FSB speeds on
their faster systems, making them accomplish more than just make lots
of heat (which they do very well).  I've personally seen Matlab code
that took a day to run on a dual Xeon Win 2000 machine complete in 10
minutes on a Powerbook G4.  I was pretty satisfied with that.

> Most people I know that use them seem to cite
> software as the primary reason to use one, and don't really know
> anything about the hardware.  Am I wrong believing that pretty much any
> software you can get for Mac OS you can find equivalents (or even the
> same software) for in other operating systems?

Pretty much.  But the same can be said about *NIX too, no?

I went to Mac because of the UNIX core, because I can't stand Windows,
and because I can get a UNIX laptop without spending days on end
fighting with hardware issues during an install (I never was *that*
savvy).  I grew fond of UNIX in my SGI days way back when in college.

I always struggled with Linux, mostly because of the implementational
changes.  For example, I'd eventually figure out how to get my USB
CD-RW working under a certain release of Mandrake, and everything was
just peachy.  Then I'd upgrade Mandrake to whatever newest version
they had I'd find out that file locations had changed and different
mechanisms were used and have to learn everything all over again.
Sometimes I really just really wanted the %^&*(*)% thing to work and
the game just got old.