“Maximum PC” did a test on a Intel-based Mac with Bootcamp. It shows that on a set of performance benchmarks, Windows XP consistently outperform Mac’s native OS X. It is supposedly to be very shocking.
First of all, I found these tests meaningless for 99.9% of us. Most of our time spent in front of the computer is not waiting for the CPU to finish its number crunching, but rather reading/watching/thinking/creating stuffs, or in the Windows case, fixing it. People buy an iPod not because it is screamingly fast playing music – it is adequate in terms of speed – but rather because of its design beauty and functional elegance. Same goes with the Mac.
But competition is always beneficial to the consumers. Apple will seriously look into their software performance. To their defense, some of those benchmarks are based on softwares that haven’t been optimized for the new Intel platform. We should expect performance go up a lot when they are.