it’s easy and fun to claim they run poorly and crash. I work with 3 machines–a pc notebook, a pc desktop, and an apple desktop.

My desktop and notebook run windows XP pro. They network easily & quickly, never crash, and definetly outperform the G4 running OSX, which frequently suffers from application crashes. (My “Mail” program crashes every other day)

I’m not going to say one is better than the other…but I might be careful of bashing one or the other :D.

I personally prefer my pc, because even though having worked with macs for sometime, I think my mac functions much slower due to the keyboard combinations. I don’t ever have to touch my pc mouse, and my pc keyboard shortcuts are easy to use. On my mac most of the combos seem to involve pressing 3 or 4 buttons that are side by side with one hand…

Just as I am hard pressed to see Steve Jobs let the machines boot into BIOS. So in those respects, to the average user I don’t think there will be anything visibly different.

To the person who likes to dig in a little deeper like myself, well, we will just have to adjust to the fact that there is no PowerPC chip inside and we will have plain ol’ x86.

Like Eric says, ultimatly it shouldn’t matter as long as it is running OS X… but it is just one less thing that makes the Mac platform different. Not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, but always different. It shouldn’t bother me, I doubt I have ever done anything where I could have said “Boy am I glad I did this on a PowerPC chip instead of x86!”. But, yet, on some level it does bother me.

As for OS X running on commodity PC hardware… will it happen? Yes. Will it run well? Probably not.

Reason: Apple only has to keep current (or any) drivers for a limited amount of hardware. So, depending on what motherboard chipset they use, and other hardware like video cards etc, OS X may or may not run on just any old PC.

If Apple goes all Intel on the motherboard then sure maybe some PCs out there will run OS X with a minor amount of hacking to get it to boot. But I doubt if it will ever run as stable as it does on the hardware Apple provides.

The same works the other way if Apple designs a custom motherboard. Running Windows XP on Apple’s hardware, while feasible, it may run poorly and be crash prone… [jab]wait how is that any different?[/jab]

My $0.02.

I was shocked too. 1) I thought G5′s were awesome, anandtech.com released some bechmarks right before this that proved otherwise. 2) I thought IBM would push the G5 on the desktop with the Xbox 360 using the G5. 3) I thought heat was a problem on x86, not G5.

But now the shock is over. What I see as some huge advantages of this deal:
- Virtual PC won’t have to do h/w translations. It’ll run real nice.
- Hopefully macs will be cheaper.
- Hopefully macs will run faster and cooler. My G4 powerbook is a dog.
- Maybe game developers will think about macs more.

Gaming and price are the two big negatives about Apple, I hope this helps.

Now, they want to make parts interchangeable in an effort to make the Harley more popular in the market.

You know, call me a new snob, but I could care less if the OS can be put on a PC. I want my Mac – I’ve already fallen in love with it – and let those who would rather run Mac OSX step to the plate, baby…

(It will probably be easier to get a Windows emulation environment running under MacOS on an Intel processor, but if I understood you correctly, I believe you were referring to native ports of applications from one OS to another.)

But no matter what Apple says or tries to do, third parties will figure out a way to let Windows run on Apple hardware, and OS X run on non-Apple PCs. That’s already happened with programs like VirtualPC and PearPC. Having both operating systems on the same chip architecture will make the job of tearing down the wall that much simpler.

“Potentially” is the big word here, as apple will not allow this to happen (I believe that have officially stated that somewhere).

What *could* happen is being able to boot windows (and linux obviously) onto the new mac machines.