Is Apple, long a minority platform in IT shops, poised for a huge leap in acceptance, not by fighting Windows, but by beating Microsoft at its own game? The unbelievable now seems more than possible -- Macs may be the new ultimate developer boxes.

Hot on the heels of a recent study which indicated that Apple could see a huge sales boost if their new Intel-based line of Macs could dual-boot to Windows, the good folks at OnMac.net announced that they had a winner in their contest to see who could be the first to prove positively that an Intel Mac could run Windows natively (see "Intel Mac Boots Windows XP")

Now, The Register points to a story on GearLog showing that the new Core Duo Intel-based laptop from Apple beats all comers at running a set of Photoshop scripts under Windows. Let's look at the potential significance here for a moment. The GearLog guys were running Photoshop scripts, on a Mac, which was running Windows XP, and this kludged-together, totally unoptimized hodgepodge ran faster than the fastest Windows-native Core Duo laptops previously tested. What this says is that Apple has pulled a real rabbit out of its hat here, and potentially has a real barn-burner.

If the still-to-come OS X-optimized version of Photoshop from Adobe runs even faster than the unoptimized Windows version running on an unoptimized platform, one can perhaps extrapolate that Intel-based Macs will be killer development boxes. If developers now can run OS X, Windows, and Linux, natively, on the same box, the best of all worlds may be just over the horizon.

I know a small but increasing number of developers over the years who have chosen Powerbooks to do their development on, but the biggest stumbling block has always been the need to revert to the painfully-slow Virtual PC (now a Microsoft product) for anything that required a copy of Windows to be running -- say, to use Visual Studio or one of the many other Windows-only development tools. Now it's looking like Windows may not only run natively on the new Intel Macs, but run really, really fast. This could be big. What do you think? Let us know!

Posted by Richard Hoffman at 02:36 PM | Permalink