by Mikael Hansen, LSCR
If you went to the annual San Francisco Macworld Expo at the downtown Moscone Convention Center in January, it soon became clear that the exterior design of Apple's new lineup of Core Duo iMacs is largely unchanged. The very significant difference, a tiny processor pair, resides well under the hood; Macs now have Intel Inside. Gone are the old days of Apple commercials such as the one depicting a snail with an Intel chip on its back.
The reason why Apple didn't stay faithful to the PowerPC chips which arose from a partnership with Motorola and IBM was that the need for speed collided with the chips using too much power and generating too much heat for the popular iMac G5 model and the PowerBooks. The PowerPC chip technology simply did not advance quickly enough to meet present and future demand, especially in the area of putting two (Duo) processors on a single slice of silicon.
The new Macs are indeed speedy. Contrary to Apple marketing claims, they are not two to three as fast (much less two to three times "faster") as their PowerPC counterparts, but they are fast; faster on some tasks and, for now, slower on others. The tradeoff in the forseeable future for the increase in speed is software compatibilty; you will in some cases have to install the latest version of some of your software applications, and in rare cases, there is no immediate solution. Notably, the "Classic" environment used to run pre-OS X applications is not supported on the Intel Macs.
Most third-party programs written for Mac OS X on PowerPC also run on the new machines, thanks to a clever technology that Apple calls Rosetta; the performance of applications running under Rosetta is slower than native performance, but in most cases should be acceptable. The following applications widely used on campus are some that appear to be performing fine on the Intel Macs: Microsoft Office X, Eudora, Thunderbird, Firefox, FileMaker and Norton AntiVirus. Apple's own software applications, like Safari, iTunes and the the rest of i family, are already available in Intel-native format.
There are still a few support issues which keep us from being able to enthusiastically recommend the Intel Macs at this point. Notably, the current version of the Cisco VPN used to access OPTRS does not seem to work. This is a show-stopper issue for some users, and there may be other incompatibilities which come to light over the next couple of months. For now, we recommend that you contact your LSCR support team before you buy any Intel Mac, so we can verify that it will work for your day-to-day tasks. We expect that most of the problems will shake out by the time spring rolls around.
The good news is also that the iMacs are still inexpensive and very likely to stay so; they are actually so cheap that you may consider a bigger screen and extra disk capacity when purchasing your first Core Duo iMac. And if you would like to hold onto a PowerPC Mac for sentimental reasons or otherwise, now is a great time for that as well!
If you have any questions, feel free to contact your LSCR support team.
