Earlier this week I got a call regarding the Intel Core Solo based Mac mini that was smoked by a PowerBook G4.

    Apparently, the gamer spoke with Apple and did not get the answer he wanted.  His concern being that it might be a bad video card.

    Turns out the game was Halo.   A game originally invented and premiered on a Mac computer.  

    Halo, however, has not yet been updated to the Universal Binaries, so it ran in emulation mode on the Mac mini.  And, the Mac mini has an integrated video card.

    I recommended that the gamer download some playable demos of other games that have been updated to Universal Binaries.  Naturally, the next question was, “Which game?”

    Recalling that our own resident gamer had informed me about the Universal Binary patch for DOOM III, I recommended DOOM III.  Which as also a game I played on the Intel based MacBook Pro and throughly enjoyed it.

    It’s been a whole month with an Intel Based Mac, and I am quite impressed with it’s performance.  And even more impressed with the number of applications that have been upgraded so quickly.

    Yes, there are still more apps to go, Photoshop included.  Even still, the working demo of Photoshop CS running in emulation mode is surprisingly fast.

    I’ve been running AppleWorks and Microsoft Office in emulation mode and have found them both to be enjoyable experiences that were beyond what I would have expected from emulation mode.

    Then again, it reminds me that the early Connectix versions of VirtualPC and GameSation respectively ran Windows applications and SONY PlayStation games nearly as smooth and fast as on the original machines. Boy, those were the days.  Then, of course, Connectix underwent some changes which, respectively, resulted in the removal of support for third party graphics cards and a court ban of PlayStation.  Connectix suffered a copyright infringement lawsuit and was eventually bought out by Microsoft.  No respect, I get now respect”.

    Emulation mode became a dirty word, most often associated with three words, “Slow, very, slow”.  Okay, it’s two words, but if you repeat them three times, you’ll get the point.  

    Today, a wise professor from Trent University and recent owner of a MacBook Pro and more important a long term owner of a 667Ghz PowerBook Titanium told me that he was very impressed with how much faster Microsoft Word ran on his new 2.0GHz MacBook Pro.

    What makes this interesting is that Microsoft Office is not yet Universal. Yes, it was running in emulation mode, not native mode.  I replied to the professor’s comment with, “It going to get faster”. Faster, that is, when Microsoft Office is upgraded.

    So which is better...

    As  Randy (and Mike) have pointed out, the new Macs are very fast.  

    As Jason from the University of Waterloo pointed out, it still depends on what kind of applications you are running (i.e., Apps that benefit from RISC code, Altivec Velocity Engines and 64-bit multi-processing.  The IBM PowerPC G5 is superior with some Unix and scientific applications.

    And, coming up in April, as pointed out by a Hacker, the Intel Based Macs ran Windows Xp faster than top of the line PCs.

    In short, all Macs today, from G4 upto the Intel Core Duo are fast.

    The new Macs with Intel Core Duo processors running Universal Binaries are “Wicked Fast”.

    Let the games begin...