I originally posted this on my business-focus blog, but though it would be of interest to readers of this blog as well. This is the first post in a series on the new Intel-based Macs.
I have to admit that when I heard Apple was releasing a new series of Macs based on the Intel chip, I was a little befuddled. For years, one of the claims to fame of the PPC and G-series CPUs is that they ran circles around the Intel equivalents in terms of performance. Soon enough, I started hearing about how Apple had, once again, done a fabulous job of porting their entire solution to a completely different hardware structure (ala Motorola 68000 CPU architecture to PPC architecture) in a way that was seamless to the end user. Then there were reports that you could actually install Windows XP and run it on one of the Intel-based Macs, some reports indicating that Windows even ran better on an Intel-based Mac than on your average name-brand Windows-only PC.
Then two announcements caught my attention. The first came from Apple, introducing a public beta of a software known as Boot Camp. The second came from a company I had previously not heard of called Parallels, announcing a solution that would allow you to run non-Mac operating systems in a virtual environment on Intel-based Macs.
Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued, and I started my research. That, combined with several queries from my mixed environment clients, prompted me to acquire an Intel-based Mac and do my own research. What follows are my initial observations of the solutions.
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