There's a voice among Macsters that is crying out loud after the switch.
What it is crying out is, "Macs won't be special anymore." (this is just an indirect way of saying, "I won't be special anymore," but we'll leave that subject alone today).
The purpose of this article is to prove that when it comes to hardware, Macs aren't special now, and haven't been for a long, long time.
You have glimpsed the truth, and it hurts. We feel your pain, and now we're going to increase it.
Welcome to X86, Macsters. Now you'll have a box like the rest of us.
But then, you already did.
The Myth of Hardware Superiority
There was a time when Macs did use better quality components than PCs. Those days petered out during the early-to-mid nineties. They definitely died when Little Stevie came back.
To cut costs and save the company, Jobs began subsituting off-the-shelf PC parts and adopted PC standards for the Mac.
The hard, cold reality is most of a Mac is built from off-the-shelf PC parts. Even more to the point, they are rarely the best the PC world has to offer. They're PC parts with a Mac driver (when needed), that's all.
Hard drives? Currently, the G5 PowerMacs are using either Seagate Barracudas or Maxtor Maxline Plus IIs. 7200rpm, 8Mb cache. They're OK drives, but hardly the best the PC world has to offer; in the case of Maxtor, they're not even the best Maxtor has to offer.
Video cards? PC video cards from nVidia and ATI, and with the exception of the optional nVidia 6800 Ultra card, pretty old/low performance at that. They're AGP cards (another PC standard), and a rapidly obsolescent one at that.
Memory? PC vanilla DDR PC3200. Intel has already moved to DDR2 memory. Nothing special here.
I could go on and on and on.
Apple doesn't buy shoddy parts, but on the whole, they're best described as reliable rather than cutting-edge. They certainly aren't special or premium, and usually, they're best described as trailing-edge.
The general pattern is that of trailing PCdom, then periodically catching up (though rarely exceeding):
For the last number of years, the only parts of a Mac that are uncontestably not PC have been the CPU and the motherboard.
The same is at least as true for the Apple components themselves, and they've been trailing-edge, too. The PPC has usually trailed x86 designs (though ironically, much less than usual with the G5s).
Yes, we know all those charts Apple put up over the years "proving" that the PPC was soooo much better than anything Intel had. Well, to make a long story short, those charts were based on pretty cherry-picked information. The general consensus outside of Macfandom is that the last few generations of PPCs almost catch up with x86 when first introduced, then fall behind. A few programs like Photoshop, with a long tradition of Mac sales and support, tend to be highly optimized for Macs and do relatively better, but then programs that originated in the Windows world tend to do relatively worse.
It may come as another shock to Macsters, but again, the hard, cold reality is Apple isn't a very innovative company. What they're extremely good at is looking like one, and this is how they do it:
First, when they catch up to PC technology, they talk about it like the improvement was something new and unique. They never say it's new or unique to the PC world, but easily leave that impression among the credible.
Second, what Apple does is take some up-and-coming PC technology, and makes it standard, or near standard before the PC makers do. They don't invent or make the technology, they make it standard before anyone else.
For instance, DVD recorders and large LCDs were certainly available in the PC world at the time Apple made them standard or a high-priced option. So was 802.11g cards (aka Airport). So was Firewire (the only recent technology Apple DID invent) cards, Apple just made them standard.
In the near future, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Apple make something like the Gigabyte i-RAM card standard in its Power Macs (that ought to make the graphic designers happy) sooner rather than later.
The only tangible area where Apple can be said to do a better job than the average PC company is in machine design. Cases look nice, and are built well. The interiors are more ergonomically-inclined than the typical insides of a PC. That won't change with an Intel processor inside.
Nor is there any validity to any notion that Apple magically makes the whole more than the sum of its parts by carefully matching components. Computers don't work that way; we're not making blended Scotch whisky here. You don't and can't get a first-rate system by carefully matching a number of second-rate parts. It is possible to have component mismatches: a very fast video card won't come near its potential with a very slow CPU, but that doesn't mean a slower video card would perform better.
So, you see, when it comes to hardware, you won't be stepping down when Apple goes x86. If anything, it will likely be a bit of a step up. Apple will continue to be free to "innovate" the same way.
This isn't a matter of the Mac being degraded into a pretty Dell. You already have the functional equivalent of a pretty Dell, and a pretty dimwitted one at that. This will get rid of the "pretty dimwitted" part, that's all.
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