Stan's List

InfoWorld has voted Mac OS X.4 (Tiger), Best Client and Best Server Operating Systems in the 2006 Technology of the Year Awards

The Power Mac G5 also earned awards for Best Workstation, in its Quad guise. Of the G5, InfoWorld wrote, “impressive hardware specs, sub-$5,000 price tag, and the magic of OS X.”

AppleInsider is reporting that Intel is developing the Power Mac Intel motherboard. Intel produces their own motherboards and provides to OEM (original equipment manufacturers) companies like Dell. The thought is that production costs would be reduced for Apple thus lowering the price of the Power Mac

PC Mag has reviewed Apple’s sweet new quad-processor PowerMac G5 and it easily tops the best numbers posted by a PC. What’s surprising is the relative margin of victory:

“The Quad G5 got the highest score we’ve ever seen on the CPU-stressing CineBench rendering test: 1,104. The Pentium EE840 overclocked to 3.6 GHz recently got a 667, and an Athlon 64 4800+ overclocked to 2.7 GHz scored 775. CineBench is a multithreaded app, so the more cores or threads your system can handle, the more efficiently your workload gets done.”

Apple is offering “free” overnight shipping on a range of Macs in each of its product lines. This offer applies only to stock models, so regular charges apply when shipping BTO kit.

Use these links to track down eligible models:

• PowerMac G5

• iMac G5

• iBook

• Mac mini

Naturally, some restrictions and quid pro quos apply, but Apple does state that product will ship within 24 hours of it being ordered (not necessarily the same day).

Apple’s PowerBooks and iPods are # 1 in PC World’s reliability surveys – for the second year running, in the PowerBook’s case.

The survey was comprised 35,000 PC World readers. Apple PowerBooks shared laptop honors with Lenovo’s (formerly IBM’s) ThinkPads for support, service and reliability. Somewhat surprisingly, Mac desktops rated less highly.

Customers were satisfied with Mac desktops’ reliability, but the survey results noted, “Apple’s scores for failed components and failed core components slipped into the average range.”