Anyone who has seen me present knows I'm a Mac user. I carry around a Powerbook nearly everywhere I go. I'll spare you the details of how and why I started with my Powerbook.

Mac OS X 10.4 is a great upgrade. It's managed to make my system perform better without adding new hardware, which is a good thing. It's got a full-text index, a Longhorn..err…Vista "innovation" that Apple will have been shipping product with for 18 months by the time Vista ships. Dashboard is flashy, spiffy, and useful for doing the things you'd usually do by visiting half a dozen web pages (weather, movie tickets, magic 8 ball. What, you don't use a magic 8 ball?)

The Intel switch is something I'm looking forward to. After seeing the problems Microsoft has had with shipping XP x64 with respect to driver support, if Apple can pull off this switch in the next 6 months or so (which they'll probably do) then Microsoft is going to look really bad. Linux for x64 shipped the same day as the Athlon 64. Mac OS X shipped on 64 bit platforms over a year ago. It took Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, the premier maker of operating systems, almost 2 years to ship an Athlon64-enabled product (The Athlon64 shipped in September 2003, Windows XP x64 shipped April 2005). If Apple can deliver a working product with a supported software library, they are going to look really good.

The other interesting thing is after reading several articles about the Rosetta technology, the PowerPC on x86 translator, it's going to be very good stuff. Testers are projecting that software is running at 80% plus performance. Apple has said all of the iLife and iWork products have already been ported, and Adobe has committed to shipping Photoshop for Mac OS X Intel as soon as Apple ships the hardware. So, GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto, Pages and Keynote will all work natively on Day 1, along with Mail. That's pretty much everything I use.

Do I think that Apple will eventually or ever support using their operating system on commodity hardware? I honestly hope not. You have to realize, as good as Apple's software is, their hardware is absolute genius. Rugged, reliable, stylish, and most of all FUNCTIONAL. I don't want them to get out of the laptop market. They're really good at it.