At first, I thought that my brand new Mac Mini was really slow. The web browser took a while to come up, and it was pretty sluggish. i installed Firefox, and that was about the same. It felt like a Windows PC running on maybe a Pentium II.

Then I realized that I’ve been running most applications as PowerPC binaries. My mac is an Intel core duo. it turns out, that most applications aren’t really available compiled as Intel-native yet. Apple provides an emulation layer, so you can run PowerPC apps on your Intel Mac, and its pretty transparent. The apps do run slower though.

It turns out, that if you look around carefully, you can find Intel-compiled version of many applications. For example, Firefox, and MPlayer — two important ones.

For the most part, these are beta or pre-release versions of the applications which will be officially out for Intel Mac soon. When I upgraded Firefox, for example, to the Mac Intel version, it was like a night-and-day difference. It even ran circles around Safari, the apple-bundled browser.