* Users react to Apple’s Intel shift
Users of Apple Mac and Intel servers had anticipated more than what they got when Apple announced last week that it would move all its Macs to Intel processors and away from IBM’s PowerPC processor.
Apple said it would shift its processors to Intel after finding out that IBM could not supply 3-GHz and low-power PowerPC processors.
Users had anticipated that the move would also mean that the Mac operating system, Mac OS X, would now run on any Intel-based server or desktop.
The ability or inability to run Mac OS X on any hardware other than Macs is a big consideration for Mike Maday, senior LAN manager at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.
“I’ll only consider Mac OS X if I can buy a Dell, HP or a respectable ‘white box’ that I can run OS X on – or if the price for those computers is competitive with Dell and HP/Compaq,” he says.
But Maday won’t have a chance to run Mac OS X on a Dell machine anytime soon. “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac,” says Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller.
“That doesn’t preclude someone from running [Windows] on a Mac. They probably will,” he says. Apple’s OS will be jiggered to run only on Intel-based Mac hardware.
Users and analysts still hope that by using Intel processors, Macs will become less expensive and more price-competitive with machines from Dell, HP or IBM.
“If and only if the price drops – making Macs competitive with the median-level PC business computer – will the numbers grow in our organization,” says Wes Thompson, networking technician at Southern California Regional Center in Torrance, Calif. “It is financially difficult to buy a new classroom of Macs when we can replace two classrooms of PCs for the same or less money.”
Thompson and a three-person IT department have 500 PCs and 25 Macs.
