Tom Yager has been a strong proponent for and expert reporter on Apple products and technologies for Infoworld. Recently, he took a self-imposed break from Apple hardware to gain some new perspective. Now, heis back and reported on Tuesday that there are some compelling technologies outside the Apple sphere, but heis also found a new appreciation for what Apple does.

"...I take my responsibility to readers very seriously. I canit very well counsel you on technology choices if I consider the field limited to one worthwhile player, [Apple] especially when that player projects the image that it competes only with the generation of systems that preceded whatis presently sold."

Mr. Yager found his time away from Apple valuable. Traditionally, heis also reported on AMD, he spent his time delving into that company exclusively.

"The genuine, practical superiority of AMDis Barcelona server platform, and its Phenom desktop platforms that derived from Barcelona, came to light during the break I took from Mac," Mr. Yager noted. "A one socket, quad core Spider (Phenom plus ATI CrossFire graphics) runs Vista so obscenely fast that even a diehard Mac useris head will turn. Privately, of course."

The noted Apple author also discovered that Appleis Webkit is taking off like wildfire, even amongst Appleis competitors. Apple has held nothing back. Of course, Apple also has a lot to gain as even competitors adopt these technologies. Being away for awhile also gave Mr. Yager a keen appreciation for the enormous effort Apple puts into every point release of Darwin, the open source core of Mac OS X.

"Taking a break from Mac hardware gave me a chance to drink more deeply of the software that Apple maintains off its beaten path. MacPorts and Appleis validated versions of open source projects are open source treasure troves stuffed with some 5,000 free applications tuned and packaged for Intel and PowerPC Macs. Digging through these repositories is so addicting that I had to issue myself an edict to get back to work, which I shall do, newly confident in my mission and purpose. Iim a Macophile for good reason," Mr. Yager concluded.