Volt, consider the contradiction: you like the integration of hardware and software ... but you don't like the software. So why would you bother buying one at all?
Anyway, from the laptop thread,
Volt wrote:Backing it up:
I just read blogs and site news here and there.
They all say the same thing. That it will be easier to Run A windows OS along-side an Apple OS because of the Pentium Switch. Of course Apple won't officially support this, But they aren't going to stop anyone from doing it.
There's also the idea that Microsoft Might go ahead and allow this through ambigious support, Because they're getting more money. Seeing as how they aquired Virtual PC, the emulation of a WindowsOS on an AppleOS will be a lot easier.
Blogs and site news != Apple's word (or even Microsoft's).
"It will be easier" can mean anything from "I can hack it to death but Apple will take my warranty agreement and burn it in my face" to "I inserted the CD and it worked." Odds are it will mean the former.
Moreover, if you're buying an Intel Mac *just* to run Windows, that seems rather a waste, frankly. You would be paying a premium for an arguably better hardware/software combination, but you would only be buying it for the hardware, and if Apple is Apple, it won't have any of the ports on it that PC owners take for granted (PS/2, floppy, parallel, serial) other than the usual suspects.
Microsoft will definitely see a speed boost with VPC if they enable native Intel support and use the virtualization technology in the architecture. This may or may not make Microsoft apps first class citizens, and I think some Mac owners would rebel if it seemed that Windows and Mac apps would co-exist because that also means mal/spyware would also be first class citizens. At least under the current situation, they run in their own private hell, and I presume the sandbox will be preserved for Mac VPC-x86 (like VMware and VPC for Windows do now).
I'm not happy.