On May 11, 5:42 pm, Mike Hore OVE.invalid.aapt.net.au>
wrote:

Good for you.

I think that the iAPX32 architecture is far too legacy-ridden to be a
good one, and too messy and complicated. Plus, I'm biased in favor of
big-endian architectures.

But then I'm not entirely a RISC fan either.

Unless IBM starts making affordable desktop zSystem machines, the last
architecture of the type *I* really prefer went out with the 680x0.

But the PowerPC is perhaps the next best thing; from the standpoint of
hardware diversity, it is regrettible that the Mac abandoned it.

But I have to admit that Apple didn't have much choice: for one thing,
it was competing for its life against the Wintel world, and if its
suppliers could not provide it with the processor chips with which to
compete, having their own priorities, well, what could they do?

And, of course, Boot Camp.

The reason Windows 3.1 knocked the Mac for a loop from which it never
recovered was that if you already had a (sufficiently powerful) PC
running DOS, you had two choices of how to get a GUI.

Buy a whole other computer - a Macintosh.

Or just buy one piece of software - Microsoft Windows 3.1.

Now, it's if you start from a Macintosh that you would have access to
the Windows XP/Vista world for just the price of the operating system.
Of course, this isn't exactly the same situation.

If what you get for starting from a Macintosh is access to the pool of
Macintosh software, that's not too impressive.

If what you get for starting from a Macintosh is a better user
interface, less worry about viruses, and so on, of course, then the
fact that access to the pool of Windows software is no longer going to
cost the price of another computer is a big plus. While the fact that
Windows is a GUI - of sorts, if you prefer - means that Apple doesn't
today have the big advantage today that Microsoft had in the
beginning, it's still a great improvement. A Macintosh is now a "safe"
investment. And as market share grows, the software situation,
perceived as its biggest drawback, will improve: nobody buys a Mac
*just* to put Windows on it.

John Savard