Actually, I was debating about the Intel Mac. I was given to understand that the clock speed on a Mac is actually much faster than the same clock speed on a Wintel box for reasons that escape me.

To oversimply slightly the argument was more like the PPC could do "more" per-clock cycle than an Intel processor, so just comparing CPUs on clock speed was comparing apples and oranges.

Now that Macs are using Intel processors, is the distinction gone?

Yes. Any speed differences now will be down to the OS rather than the CPU type. Whether that actually makes a difference I neither know nor care :-)

If I opt for the Intel version, what am I really getting (besides Boot Camp)?

You'll probably get a longer shelf life for the computer. Apple is moving away from PPC as fast as it can, and I imagine that attitude will make a difference during the lifetime of your machine.

You'll get a faster computer for anything that's running Intel code (some Mac applications will be running on a virtual PPC until they are ported, so these will likely be slower than they would on a modern PPC).

The more interesting thing you'll get is likely ports of software like VMware to the Mac in the near future. Virtualisation rocks!

Basically - if you're a coder I would get an Intel box. About the only reason to go for a PPC is if you need to run software like Photoshop that's not been ported to run natively on the Intel under Mac OS X yet.

I have a new (3 weeks old) Intel Mac laptop, and perl can't get beyond "Hello World." I've gone to typing examples out of my textbooks, and they all fail. Is anyone having luck with the Intel Mac? Looks like I have may purchased a large paperweight.