This is the best reason for switching to Intel.

I own a G4 laptop (as well as 5 or 6 Windows laptops and desktops) and would not trade my Mac for anything else, for what it’s worth.

Apple does need to do something to get performance parity going - I use a number of software synthesizers from Native Instruments and others that are delivered cross-platform for both Mac and Windows, and I’m afraid the Pentium 3.x laptop and AMD Opteron boxes I have outperform my 1.33 Ghz G4 in terms of number of voices and disc access for I/O bound apps alike.

I very much adore the form factor (12 inch) of the Powerbook, and OSX is no worse than Windows (nor better, particularly), and I would really love to see a more powerful machine in this form factor. Windows boxes in this form factor (tiny notebooks) tend to be underpowered affairs because the manufacturers slant them towards battery life rather than floating point perf and disc I/O (which is what my applications care about, mostly).

Apple is unique in offering a premium performance laptop (the 12 inch PowerBook is almost as powerful as the 17 inch) in such a small form factor, and I applaud that, and I’m looking forward to a day when I can get this same form factor but with 2-3 times the performance.

This is mostly off-topic from the main gist of the article, but I’d just like to point out that this is not true at all.

Windows NT’s release in 1993-1994 (I forget exactly) was a complete rewrite of the OS from the ground up, as opposed to Windows 95, which was an attempt to graft something on top of the existing Windows 3.1 code.

Microsoft had a much bigger problem than Apple has ever had, in that there is an unbelievably large, almost untestable matrix of combinations of hardware - Apple owns the hardware for their platform, and thus has a much simpler problem as regards backwards compatibility.

In any case, early versions of NT were designed with robustness first, and compatibility with old apps and hardware second, whereas Win95 and its descendants (98 and ME) were hybrids (most definitely NOT written new from scratch) with the goal of continuing to run as much of the old stuff as possible.

The backwards compatibility problem for Microsoft was so difficult that it was not until the release of Windows XP that they were finally able to ditch all the old code, and run the volume product (the one that home users and business clients use) on the Windows NT core kernel.

In fact, Windows has been written multiple times, in many different forms, and from scratch in every sense the same way that OSX was a cleansheet design from OS9.

I’m sure many will try to disagree with this, but this is factual (I worked at Microsoft during the period, and believe me, NT core code has NOTHING to do with DOS and/or Windows 16 - they had to forcibly MAKE it run Windows apps - at one time it also could run OS/2 1.x apps and POSIX apps) , and in any case, it’s not germane to the point your article is trying to make. Simply trying to set the record straight.