[qubex]

The high-tide of Apple machines in genetic research actually has nothing to do with what most people might presume and has a very specific, very technical reason.

The AltiVec (“Velocity Engine”) present in G4 and even more so in 64-bit G5 machines was discovered to be extraordinarily efficient at performing the calculations required for the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (commonly known as BLAST). At the time, the G4/G5 architectures had a massive lead on other chips present on the market at the time (i80x86-derived machines such as Pentium III, Pentium 4, and Pendium M; but also other exotic architectures such as MIPS, SPARC, and DEC’s Alpha.

Eventually other architectures caught up by adding vector units or vector instructions of their own, and Apple stripped any basis of fact out of this when they switched to Intel, but by a form of institutional inertia, Macs still rule in the genetics segment.