The arstechnica article about Apple’s bulging memory requirements and compilation settings are interesting also. It’s going to be amusing to watch all these Mac enthusiasts drooling over their new fast Intel workstations when they will still continue to see benchmarks where Linux and Windows continue to kick their backsides, but this time on exactly the same hardware. And Apple are talking about power per watt?! Hell yer! It’s called a G5, and it’s power management is better than anything Intel will have over the next few years. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a G5 machine whatsoever in terms of performance (as everyone has known really), and the only reason why Apple wanted a 3GHz+ G5 was because their OS is simply too damn slow and crap. So basically Apple have been lying through their teeth when complaining about IBM and the G5s. They are following the old BCG model, where what you do with a cash cow is milk it for all its worth. One suspects that Jobs and Co are back in the eighties in more ways than one. And it is going to have a harder and harder time demanding a premium on either OS or hardware or both. And it doesn’t have so many it can afford to lose any. The miraculous marketing machine is going to have a harder and harder time turning on a dime and taking all its customers with it. That is really very interesting, and it does indeed promise a most interesting couple of years ahead. And there may be cost advantages to the move, though perhaps, not clear, at some performance hit.

There is something wrong with the OS apparently, and whatever it is, it is not wrong with Linux, and it is not getting fixed at all fast.

Changing processors is not going to do anything for performance – in fact, it may lower it. There is apparently nothing whatever wrong with the ppc processor in terms of performance. Yes, this is the point that leaps out at me too.

Compare os x to linux