put on your universal-binary pants!

Time and again, Daring Fireball delivers the most well-informed, level-headed, in-depth comments on the current state of Apple affairs. In this post both the new hardware and software announced at Macworld San Francisco are thoroughly reviewed.

The author manages to give a balanced evaluation of Intel- vs. PowerPC-performance and offers a reasonable explanation why the new Intel models are in fact neither so much faster nor so much cheaper, as expected or predicted by various other fora and Mac-related journalism. [1. they are not 2-3x, but "in real life" 20-25% faster; 2. the G5 was - and still is - in fact a quite powerful processor; 3. the new chips are dual-core rather than single, and this has obvious consequences both for their pricing and for the way their performance can be gauged].

Also, the issue of the unchanged (or in the case of the MacBook Pro, only slightly improved) case design is addressed. Sure, everybody expected something completely new and different, but as the post argues, making the transition only in the interior while leaving the (so far successful and popular) exterior virtually intact makes sense, in taht it is highlighting the fact that "it is just a mac with a new, faster and more powerful processor chip". As Daring Fireball puts it: "A shift, not a schism".

But also finer points like the altered disk partition format and its possible consequences are discussed, a point that will likely be vital for those of you safety-conscious enough to have an external (FW) hard drive from which to boot a Mac in case your main system is crashed, or you need to run "your" system, i.e. your entire OS, home folder, apps, in short your whole computer setup, on a different Mac, p.e. while your main system is down, unavailable or away for repairs. This will not be possible for the new Intel Macs, unless you reformat your FW drive to fit that new partition format, which in turn will not work with your old system any more!

For those of you as "widget-happy" as myself, the newly released widgets are discussed, and the author also takes a closer look at the pros and cons of iLife '06 and explains the new features of the newest addition to the iLife suite, iWeb which are good for "the Mac on the street" but not as good as various stand-alone software for web publishing already available.

Also, iPhoto 6 and iWork '06 get their - apparently well-deserved - beating.

"iPhoto 6 doesn’t understand the first thing about HTTP, the first thing about XML, or the first thing about RSS. It ignores features of HTTP that Netscape 4 supported in 1996, and mis-implements features of XML that Microsoft got right in 1997. It ignores 95% of RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining 5% wrong." ;-)

Finally, the Postal Service issue is addressed conclusively:

“Never would we characterize our customers that way,” Intel Vice President Deborah Conrad said in an interview.

Don’t believe it. Intel loves this ad. This ad makes Intel processors look better than any ad Intel has ever produced itself. The feeling this ad conveys is that Intel’s chips are going to be kicking some goddamn major ass inside Macs.

After such a comprehensive review of all the MWSF, it only remains for me to add both in the direction of Intel and The Postal Service:

"Remember the First Law of Advertising: any publicity is good publicity."

P.S.: Who has EVER heard of a band called "The Postal Service" before this new "rip-off" ad?