In a historic first, that many never thought they would see, PC World welcomed Apple to their Top Desktop PC charts.

While there are currently no Apple products in the Power Desktop charts, the mini might be appearing in the budget one. This is all possible due to Apple’s Boot Camp, which allows Windows to run natively on Macs and thus allows the ‘apples to apples’ comparison to be made, something that was previously impossible.

In the future, Mac and other computers out there will be benchmarked and evaluated equally, but this is unlikely to happen at least until Leopard comes out. The problem is the PC World Test Center Policy, is to only test PCs as they arrive from the vendor, with all the software preinstalled. Because of this, machines where the system has to be installed manually, such as Macs that need Boot Camp and then Windows installed, are not tested. This issue, while being incredibly simple, might never be solved, as Apple, despite having Boot Camp included in the next version of OS X, will most likely never pre install Windows on their machines.

Still, we may yet see a day when Apple computers are present on the Top Power PCs charts, the hurdles are becoming smaller and smaller with each passing day.