With the Shootout at the IT Corral set to go off this Fall, the Apple and PC vendors have started with their back to school sniper shots. Apple has Snow Leopard out a head of schedule and Speed is the Apple motto:
Above is an example, Apple is trumpeting the Speed of Mac/OSx 10.5 Snow Leopard and they are enlisting their Safari browser in the argument. Having converted to a full 64-bit OS certainly will help speed up many operations. But boot up time is still 70 seconds and app start up is 5-7 second range. Watch for a series of Speed benchmarks and other Performance Pressings from the vendors over the next few months because the Achilles heel for Windows Vista and [it appears so far] Windows 7 is slow, Slower, SLOWEST.
I suspect that Netbooks with instant-on, fast response time, total kit[software and hardware] of $400 or less, and 8hours++ battery life are going to win out among the College and University crowd. An important segment but not the whole ball game as business tries to decide is Windows 7 good enogh to stick with Microsoft – or is a virtual solution necessary?
Let me tell you the IT Corral Shootout is going to have lots of news and stories for the IT Pundits well into next year.