First Observations – Intel-based Macs

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.

First off, the hardware. I purchased a new Mac Mini (my other Mac Mini has done really, really well for me, and I frankly didn’t want or need an iMac or another notebook) with the high-end configuration. I actually made my purchased from Small Dog Electronics in Vermont and had them bump the default 512MB of RAM up to 2GB. This is one area where I do have to take issue with Apple on their default hardware configurations – there is just not enough RAM in the base system. And if you’re planning on running multiple OSes on the box, you really need to max it out. So I did.

I went through the Mac setup out of the box, and it followed the same setup process as my other Mac Mini that I purchased last year. The OS X 10.4 setup runs just the same on the Intel hardware – there were no extra or different steps I had to follow because of the Intel setup. In fact, the system seemed to run a little faster through setup than my last Mac Mini did. (No, I haven’t done any actual performance testing between the two boxes, just a “feel” thing based on my use of the original Mini for over a year.)

I then went and registered for the 30-day trial of Parallels Workstation for Intel-based Macs. I have not, and probably will not, install and test Boot Camp, and here are the reasons why:

1. Boot Camp is a multi-boot solution, not a virtualization solution. This means that if you want to run a Windows application, you have to reboot the workstation and bring it up in Windows. Conversely, if you’re running the Windows side of the Mac and need to run a Mac application, you have to reboot into Mac mode to get there. My experience with multi-boot solutions is that you’re spending more time rebooting between the two (or more) platforms than you are actually working, because you’re often not in the “right” side when you need to run a piece from the other side. However, if you only ever want to run Windows on your Intel-based Mac, then Boot Camp is the tool for you.

2. Boot Camp works best with multiple partitions, so that your Mac data is on one partition and your Windows data is on the other. My Mini has a single partition, and right now I’m not interested in repartitioning/rebuilding so that I can have a clean separation of data. Yes, you can use a single partition for installing Windows through Boot Camp, but if you want to quickly remove everything related to Windows (because of a failed install, want to wipe out and start over, whatever) it’s harder to do with everything installed on the single Mac partition.
3. If you do not install Windows correctly while booted in Boot Camp, you can wipe out everything on the hard disk, forcing you to rebuild the entire Mac from the recovery DVDs. I’m just not ready to make that leap quite yet.

At some point I will test whether you can install Windows onto an external drive (Fire wire – I couldn’t stand the performance hit of trying to run an OS off a USB drive) using Boot Camp, but that’s not tops on my priority list.

I really wanted to take a look at Parallels workstation for a couple of reasons. The biggest is that Microsoft Virtual PC for Macintosh will not run on the Intel-based Mac. To be honest, I’ve been less than impressed with Virtual PC for Mac since Microsoft bought it from Connectix, but it’s really been the only option thus far. The chances that Microsoft will try to develop a build of VPC for Mac that will run on the Intel chipset are, in my opinion, pretty slim. The other reason I was interested in Parallels was the price point: $49.99 for a single license. You can, in fact, pre-order the Mac version before the final release for $39.99, which is even more attractive than the list price of $129.99 for VPC for Mac. In both cases, you will need a legit license of Windows to install with the product. Microsoft does offer versions of Virtual PC for Macintosh that are bundled with an OS, but it costs more, and still doesn’t run on the Intel-based Macs.

So I downloaded the 30-day trial of Parallels and went through the setup process. I’ve used a number of virtualized interfaces before, including Microsoft’s Virtual PC (for PCs as well as Macintosh), Microsoft’s Virtual Server, VMWare, and a few older solutions that are no longer available, and I will say that the installation for Parallels Workstation, like just about any other Mac software install, was simple and straightforward. In about two minutes, I had the software installed and ready to go.

Given that most people who are Mac fanatics are probably going to go straight into the install process without reading any documentation whatsoever, I decided to do the same. There’s a nice PDF that comes with the Parallels install that I have yet to open. So I launched the application and got started. I went through the new Virtual Machine (VM) wizard, selected the OS I would be installing, set the path to the virtual hard disk file, and upped the RAM allocation from 256MB to 512MB. Again, it seems that Parallels missed the mark with the default RAM allocation for Windows XP, but MS says you can run XP in 128MB, so 256MB must be nice. Given that this is virtualized and probably will be slower because of it, I didn’t want lack of RAM to add to the performance issues. Hence the increase to 512MB. I inserted the XP install CD and started the install process.

Twenty minutes later, I had a fully-installed XP workstation that had already been activated over the internet. No funky drivers needed for the install, no special configuration needed. And as I started downloading security updates from MS, I noticed that the performance of the XP box is pretty peppy. In fact, it actually seems a little faster than the Dell Optiplex GX260 I’m using as my PC workstation.

I did a few quick and unscientific benchmarks on the box after I got the security updates installed, and the performance of the XP in Mac is really, really good. I compared an OWA connection to my mail server in IE with Parallels versus Virtual PC on my old Mac Mini, and the difference is night and day. In fact, testing OWA against my Dell workstation showed that the Dell is slower than the VM on the Mac.

So far, I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen. Next, I’ll be loading my regular software suite and seeing how it performs under that load. But right now I’m thinking that my desired situation, having one box on my desk running both Mac and Windows applications instead of having a dedicated Mac and a dedicated PC, is going to work very nicely. I can sure stand to get rid of the clutter of multiple keyboards and mice on my desk, too.