Ummm. iollman, once you've hung around these forums a bit longer you will come to realise the purpose of testing is to come up with the answers you were seeking. Definitely not to look under every rock, nor to peek under the covers, just in case there is something embarrassing there.

I'm truly amazed.

People are bending over backwards comparing intel boxes to intel boxes with fruit on the cover and trying to discern some real difference between them other than the fruit on the cover.

Let's see...Intel processors with Intel chipsets. They are the same darn machines. RAM, hard drives, CDs, video...all the same stuff now. It's silly to quibble over minor hardware points that will change within a fiscal quarter.

The only reason you should ever buy a mac is because you want to run Mac OS. There just isnt a compelling hardware reason to do so if the benchmarks are an indicator.

I wouldn't stand on too high a horse.

It is just a matter of MacWorld knowing its audience and also which side its bread is buttered.

I am not accusing MacWorld at all of rigging their tests. Just of not looking too far from home.

There has been an aversion to comparing, whatever the current range of Macs, to anything other than a limited field of other Macs. This is about the first time we have seen the Macs compared with competitive PCs. Not just because of the availability of Boot Camp, but because the hardware can for the first time stand up on its own merits.

When I previously raised the question of why we don't see the Mac tests include a competitve PC, all sorts of excuses were raised. But now it is all possible. Even down to PCWorld being able to lend suitable hardware and join in the testing.

Or were my previous suggestions, in retrospect, not as absurd as they were made out to be?

How so?

Other magazines and sites have done the obvious and run same/similar software on Macs and PCs. But other than qualified vague, unquantified comments attached to its tests, MacWorld has avoided the politically challenging comparisons.

Even this test doesn't compare Mac + OSX vs PC + WXP. As was said before in this thread, it just tested the same hardware, with different logos on the box, running WXP with amongst other things an out of date version of Photoshop 7 for the PC.

Some posters have stood in awe of Apple being able to create Boot Camp to launch WXP on the MacTels, when the real achievement was in their previous arrangement in making it impossible to install Windows on what is otherwise a bog standard PC.

As I stated when this whole Intel thing started rolling. The Mac is not going to able to claim, even in our greatest moments of wishful thinking, superiority over PCs anymore because it is now a PC. The only point of contention has to be the little bit that's left, which is the OS.

So are you going to test the differences? Or just the obvious similarities?

I am not criticising this test for what it showed, which at last put to bed a lot of idle conjecture. But I am still waiting like many Mac users to see Mac OSX go head to head with it's obvious competitor Windows.

"...the real achievement was in their previous arrangement in making it impossible to install Windows on what is otherwise a bog standard PC."

If you think this is an impressive achievement, then you must be easy to impress. Here's the thing -- build any PC which uses only Intel's EFI and not BIOS, and insto-presto, you have a PC on which Windows will not run absent a hack. No mystery there, really.

"So are you going to test the differences? Or just the obvious similarities?"

Considering that Macworld and PC World were performing tests even before Apple released Boot Camp and that they published new tests only a few days after Boot Camp was released, I fail to see the reason for your having an attitude about this. It seems clear to me that Macworld has wasted no time on this, and it has promised to perform more detailed and comprehensive tests in the near future.

I'm no apologist for Macworld, but what do you want -- blood?

"I am still waiting like many Mac users to see Mac OSX go head to head with it's obvious competitor Windows."

I'm mildly interested in such results myself, but the days when we would see dramatic differences in performance are largely gone. Both platforms are using similar memory (and memory speeds), the same hard disk architecture, the same (or comparable) system bus, the same (or comparable CPU), etc. For the most part, all that's left is to measure how fast an optimized Photoshop executes a particular filter under Windows as compared with its speed under OS X.

I'm sure we will see such data when Adobe creates a new Photoshop native to (and optimized for) OS X under Intel. Until then, I'm not sure what such tests will reveal, but Macworld and PC World doubtless have such tests waiting in the wings.

For most of us, however, this is no longer a burning issue. Apple's migration to Intel has at once made such comparisons more meaningful and easier to perform and at the same time ironically less compelling -- at least to me.

If Photoshop under Windows can execute a certain filter a few seconds faster than it can under OS X, I can live with that -- or if I can't, then I will just run Windows on the Mac for that particular function. But at the end of the day, there are more important things to inspire an attitude than this.

Before the real food fight begins I'd suggest people take their personal vendettas to another location -- preferably email. I, for one, don't care to read about it.

Back on topic I'll ask my question a second time: Does anybody know if Slipstreaming WinXP installer from VirtualPC works? I don't have an Intel Mac to test it myself.