I'ts fairly obvious that the existence of "a way to run Windows on a Mac" has confused the issue here.

You cannot just buy a new Mac with the Intel processor, install Windows on it, and run it as a PC.

You MUST HAVE the Mac OS INSTALLED, and also for now you must install the experimental, unsupported, uncertified, and unwarranted bootstrap utility, before you can install Windows on this machine.

This is still a Mac, and you can't buy the machine without the included Mac OS. You must separately purchase Windows and install it yourself. While there is some assurance from Apple that Windows will run on the machine, as a dual-boot machine there are serious limitations on how much sharing of working files and data the two operating systems can do.

No one in a position to know has as yet commented on whether Windows runs with all functions at full availability when run in this environment.

Apple has commited to including their dual OS software, currently called "bootcamp," in their "next OS version." They have not yet said that Macs will "come with Windows."

There is some talk about Apple and Microsoft cooperating on a new OS for Macs, that could be a "Windows with Mac appearance features." Nobody but the Apple/Microsoft people know publicly whether this is real. Guesses range from 2 to 4 years, if it happens, although it could appear quite suddenly. This speculation is based on a documented "exchange of money," implying a partnership or cooperative venture; but there is NO INFORMATION publicly known about what agreements have of have not been made.

The original Macs used the Motorola MC68000 series processor and from the first appearance of the Mac hardly anyone argued that the Intel 8086 processor used in early PCs was as good a processor. The x86 processor was a lot cheaper, and good enough for what the PC market needed.

When Motorola dropped out of the competition to keep building better/faster/more powerful processors, Apple went to IBM processors. IBM has provided improvements through several generations of processors, but apparently the small market share retained by Apple has caused them to lose interest in dumping money into trying to keep up with Intel and AMD in processor design just to support Apple. IBM can't, or won't, supply a "next generation" processor that Apple can use to keep up with what they want the new Macs, and the new Mac OS, to be able to do.

Intel claims to have processors and supporting chipsets that will permit Apple to make a "better" next-generation Mac, and appears to be willing to support Apple's goals for the next few generations. This does not mean that the Mac will be "just another PC," or that it will be "PC compatible" in any full sense of the term within the next few generations.

The need for a next generation Mac may come partly from the large number of extremely popular games available for Windows that can't be run on current Macs. Anyone considering a new machine for which gaming is to be a core/critical usage should be aware that this is the most extreme and most demanding application extant. Most Windows-designed machines have a very difficult time meeting the demands of the more sophisticated games, and are best played on machines specifically designed for game playing. It is remotely possible that a Windows that's a pimple on a wart on a "foreign" OS will match the capabilities of a "designed for play" Windows PC; but it's more likely that users will at least be able to play in slow motion, just like on a more mediocre Windows machine.

A principal reason for the earlier success of Macs in certain fields was their incorporation of full PostScript capability in the first machines, and the early cooperation of Adobe in application development. It has taken Windows quite a while to catch up.

Just as with Motorola and IBM, Adobe has recognized the larger market in PC machines, and all of the critical programs are now available in PC versions that are equal to, and arguably in some cases better than, the current Mac versions. This includes Photoshop, Pagemaker, Framemaker, PDFs, and Illustrator as a minimal list - to the extent that those programs remain identifiable in the new CS Suites. (Quark Express is the only major publishing/graphics program I'm aware of for which I have not seen detailed comparisons for the current Mac vs Windows versions - simply due to lack of personal interest.)

Very few people use enough features of any program that's now available for both kinds of machines to need to worry about which is better. The "betterness" is in features that have no meaning to ordinary mortals. (And few of us can afford the programs in which it really matters.) There remain a very few specialized programs that are available only for Mac, or only for PC. If one of these is critical to you, then your choice is obvious.

If you don't have a known critical reason based on a specific program you can only run on one or the other then there are two ways to pick which to run:

1. Which is the cutest (whether it's you, your wife, or your best friend who picks).

2. Which gets the most for the money.

If the choice really isn't obvious, you could just flip a coin.

John