Intel was always the best chipmaker, however no credit was ever given to them until they installed them into a Mac.
Just a little historical context to bury some myths: Mac users' love of the PowerPC platform was not blind fandom, but rather reflected genuine superiority over the big, hot, load, bloated, marketing-driven mess that Intel had gotten themselves into with x86.
Intel's platform today is excellent, and much faster and better than any PowerPC. But the important thing to remember: that wasn't always true. Once upon a time they were slower and less power-efficient than PowerPC.
Then two things happened:
1. PowerPC stopped advancing, as Motorola became more interested in embedded and mobile markets, and IBM became more interested in embedded and console markets. The excellent PowerPC G5 never got a successor, because neither PPC maker was interested in being in the personal computer processor market at all. (Intel was!)
2. Intel recognized what a mess they'd made of the Pentium 4, and wisely dumped that dead-end. They went back to the best of the old Pentium 3 generation and designed a new line of chips going forward from there. A line aimed at efficiency in reality rather than empty MHz numbers in ads. The new line became faster and more efficient then the old Pentium 4s--first for portables, then for desktops too.
Apple saw the portable success, and they saw the plans for the desktop move. Now, for the first time, Intel DID have a whole family of chips on the horizon that were actually worth using. At the same time, the excellent PowerPC showed signs it would go no further in the hands of IBM and Motorola.
So Apple switched, at the only time that made sense: when the new would actually be BETTER than the old. And because they had kept OS X running on Intel in secret "just in case," such an unprecedented change was actually possible. Best of all: Intel actually WANTED to work with Apple. IBM and Motorola didn't care about computers anymore.
It's lame that you have to buy so many things to get the iPod to do what the Zune can do out of the box.
I'm the one who is not bright?
Back on topic: FM? I'm glad iPods and others can do FM for those who need it. Nothing wrong with one more bullet point on a brochure. But where do people go that doesn't already have a radio sitting there? (One capable of AM as well, or even satellite.) My home, work, car, friends' houses, hotels, etc. all have them. People like music when they walk around outdoors, but I don't see very many of them with radios--I see CD players and iPods and not much else. This may be because having your OWN music and podcasts is so often superior to radio ads and DJ-selected endless repeats. Which is why the market for portable media players INSTEAD of radios is so huge.
Radio is, for most people, older and inferior for the things they want a portable player for. For everything else, there's a radio already sitting on the shelf or dashboard next to them.
That makes FM a pretty minor feature, needed by very few people--and thus doesn't need to be standard. I'm glad it's an option, but for most shoppers I don't think it's much of a selling point for a media player. And buying trends would seem to back me up. FM is something people who don't like iPods like to talk about adding cost, but very few of them actually go through life dependent on having FM in their pocket.
microsoft is macrolame
