The switch

Apple finally switched to using Intel chips.

This years MACWorld announced the MacBookPro

Apple was using PowerPC chips that were originally developed by Motorola. Motorola dropped out of the market and sold that line to IBM. Apple comprised about 70% of IBM's customer base for these chips and this was not enough of a market for IBM to develop faster units so Apple had to resort to other tricks to boost performance.

The PowerPC is based on RISC technology -- an academic thought-experiment that gained way to much traction in the real world. The idea was that a Computer that had a simplified or 'reduced" instruction set (R.I.S.-Computer or RISC) would be faster than a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) Each instruction, being simpler, would execute a lot faster and although you would need to execute more of them (they were less powerful), you would see a speed improvement. Needless to say, this didn't work and RISC remained a backwater.

Apple announced that it would be using Intel chips last year and their first products are soon to be in stores. The part of the advertising copy that I like:

You've dreamed about it long enough. Now it has a name: MacBook Pro. Powered by a dual-core Intel engine. Up to four times the speed of the PowerBook G4. Eight times the graphics bandwidth.

Considering that the G4 was their flagship, this really shows the difference between CISC and RISC... $1,999 is not a bad price for what they are offering. No mention of battery life though.

Welcome aboard! (tee hee...)