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One "handicap" that Macs may never overcome: Direct X. Most PC 3D graphics apps are optimized to run best in Direct X graphics mode, not OpenGL. For Windows PC apps, OpenGL is an afterthought. When those apps are converted to run on Mac under OpenGL... well you get the picture.

This website has a test that relates to your question: Apple vs. Mac Benchmark (Barefeats.com)

Although it doesn't show a direct comparison of the systems you mentioned, you'll notice that the P4 3.0 GHz just barely loses to a G4 1.42 (MP!) system in most of the tests and beats a G5 at 1.8 MHz in about half the tests.

This speaks well of Apple for processor cycle efficiency, but I would wager that a Pentium 3.2 would outperform a G4 1.25 by quite a lot.

Note that cross-system/OS comparisons must always be taken with a large dose of salt!

Granted, there are some cool system and case mods done with Macs, the typical Mac owner is less interested in tweaking and modding than in having a computer that works.

I look at it like this... some folks like to buy a Honda Civic, bolt on a turbo, fiddle with the exhaust and intake, and have a cheap car that can run with a Porsche 911. It may not be as bulletproof, but even with repairs, it's more affordable than the Porsche 911.... but if you're the type of person that just wants a fast car (with a warranty!) that runs, you probably won't be modding up an "inexpensive import".

No one complains of Porsche, Ferrari, or Lamborghini using proprietary parts. If you check out the cost of maintenance on one of 'em, you may even see why AppleCare is an option for the "I want something that just works!"-crowd.

Price is a wonderful point of comparison, but there is room for the Civic and the 911 in the automotive world, and no one claims that the small marketshare of Porsche indicates they are going out of business anytime soon.

Also... consider this: the "ultimate build-it-yourself" PC may not come in much cheaper than a comparable Mac. Notice these benchmarks that show a dual 2.0 Ghz G5 like the one I paid $3299 for being very competitive with a dual 2.0Ghz AMD Opteron box from Xi Computing, which clocked in at $4107.

Also... note that the gamingcomparison shows the G5 (equipped with a Radeon 9800 or 9600) does pretty good, though the difference in APIs (DirectX vs. OpenGL) can also be a factor here.

So this bring up my big question...

How many people are building systems with "off the shelf" parts that are actually significantly cheaper than a PowerMac G5, and can compete toe-to-toe with it?

Granted, there are some cool system and case mods done with Macs, the typical Mac owner is less interested in tweaking and modding than in having a computer that works.

I look at it like this... some folks like to buy a Honda Civic, bolt on a turbo, fiddle with the exhaust and intake, and have a cheap car that can run with a Porsche 911. It may not be as bulletproof, but even with repairs, it's more affordable than the Porsche 911.... but if you're the type of person that just wants a fast car (with a warranty!) that runs, you probably won't be modding up an "inexpensive import".

No one complains of Porsche, Ferrari, or Lamborghini using proprietary parts. If you check out the cost of maintenance on one of 'em, you may even see why AppleCare is an option for the "I want something that just works!"-crowd.

Price is a wonderful point of comparison, but there is room for the Civic and the 911 in the automotive world, and no one claims that the small marketshare of Porsche indicates they are going out of business anytime soon.

Also... consider this: the "ultimate build-it-yourself" PC may not come in much cheaper than a comparable Mac. Notice these benchmarks that show a dual 2.0 Ghz G5 like the one I paid $3299 for being very competitive with a dual 2.0Ghz AMD Opteron box from Xi Computing, which clocked in at $4107.

Also... note that the gamingcomparison shows the G5 (equipped with a Radeon 9800 or 9600) does pretty good, though the difference in APIs (DirectX vs. OpenGL) can also be a factor here.

So this bring up my big question...

How many people are building systems with "off the shelf" parts that are actually significantly cheaper than a PowerMac G5, and can compete toe-to-toe with it?

This (usually baseless) need to have more and more power on a laptop - and to pay top dollar for it - has to be the marketing triumph of the century (well, maybe after bottled water). My old 400MHz IBM still does everything I ask of it, and if I had the choice I'd rather double the battery life than the processor speed.

I said the same thing about my old 300mhz Celeron IBM Thinkpad until about a month ago, when I finally realized I was deluding myself, as you probably are. No offense, but to an extent I think this is a case of not really knowing what you're missing, and it's been true of public perception of every incremental speed increase in PC land in general, not just in laptops.

No doubt you think of your laptop as being the perfect machine for a certain task or tasks. And at 400mhz, it does those tasks well. Maybe you use it for programming, or word processing, email and web browsing. Maybe you even store your pictures and play your mp3's on it (though I doubt a 400mhz laptop has a very big hard drive). I did these things on my 300mhz machine too. Eventually it got to the point where even web browsing was ridiculously slow compared to my desktop, so I upgraded.

And with a faster laptop, especially a dramatically faster laptop, you are able to do many more things that you wouldn't have considered a laptop suitable for before. My new laptop has become my primary PC - I do everything on it, from photo and video editing to gaming to watching DVD's, dual-booting Linux and Windows (couldn't before; hard drive was too small) plus all the things I used to use my laptop for. Simply being a laptop is not the limiting factor that you probably think it is with an older machine.

Oh, and you will likely get better battery life with a new machine. Mine gets around 4 hours and it's not even a Pentium-M.

While I'm at it here, I want to say something about the following in the original article posting: It'd make me feel guilty, having that much power in a small package while other people can't even get it in a PC tower.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Is this a swipe at PC (in this case meaning non-Mac) users, or is it some kinship with fellow Mac users (including Macs in the term "PC" as it technically should be)? If it's a swipe at PC users, it's at worst inaccurate and at best debateable, as test after test has shown common x86-based CPU's to be at least as capable as the fastest G5 chips on a variety of real-world tasks and in synthetic benchmarks. Even a Mac-biased site such as this one shows older, slower x86 compatible chips to be neck and neck with the fastest G5 Apple still sells (and faster if you move to the games page) - and there are faster x86 chips out now (Here is a slightly more up to date comparison that focuses on 64 bit chips.) In laptops, a 1.7ghz Pentium-M runs neck and neck on most tests with a P4-3.2 desktop chip which would probably put it about on par with a single-CPU 2.0ghz G5 (I don't believe anyone has made this comparison yet, since you can't get a G5 in a laptop). And most Pentium-M laptops trump any Apple laptop in battery life. The Pentium-M is truly a revolutionary mobile chip - far more important by almost any measure than the 1.4ghz G4 being talked about here (sure wish I had one - I went on the cheap with a P4-M).

I know I burn through karma like a wildfire every time I post something like this but it needs to be said, as there are a lot of assumptions made by people out there, along with plain old myths, that just are not supported by any real-world evidence. The equivalent of PC urban legends (and yes, I do post about real UL's too!).

Isn't USB 2.0 faster than first-generation firewire? I think USB 2.0 runs at 480mbps and firewire runs at 400mbps.

That's the theoretical maximum output, never actually matched in real life. Real life benchmarks usually display much better performance of Firewire 400 over USB 2.0. There is a FAQ on USB that sums up the difference as follows: USB and 1394 are complimentary technologies. 1394 is for devices where high performance is a priority and price is not, while USB is for devices where price is a priority and high performance is not.

I was amazed at the cost/performance ratio that they were able to achieve with Big Mac. Over at Barefeats.com, they point out that a Dual 2ghz G5 is roughly 17% faster AND more expensive than a Dual 1.8 G5 - keeping the cost/performance ratio fairly equal. Taking this out to supercomputer levels, the #1 supercomputer is three and a half times faster than Big Mac but cost 60x as much money!!! Amazing.

Er. You're getting the 94xx series processors and 97x-series processors confused. Yes, the Opteron runs neck and neck with G4 servers.

Err. No, I'm not. And Opteron (or any other current generation x86'ish chip) does not run anywhere near neck and neck with G4 servers, they run way faster.

The G5 has a massively different system architecture, and you cannot say "because it beats G4s it'll beat G5s".

I'm well aware of the fact that G5 is a new system and haven't drawn that kind of conclusions.

Real-world tests of Opteron servers has shown them to be very strange beasts. Freakishly fast as some tasks, very slow at others.

From anything I've seen this far, more like: freakishly fast on most tasks, pretty average on others, and by no means slow on anything.

I'd accuse AMD of pulling the old graphic card scam - benchmarks run very fast even though real world differences are minimal - but dear lord, that would be a hellishly expensive scam to pull off.

Graphics card scams are done on drivers or by "optimizing" the benchmark software in question. And usually they get faster results by leaving out some computations that are not visible, that's impossible on general purpose CPU. And you don't have any "drivers" to do it either, nor can you make benchmarkers use your own optimized software.

No, there's no scam here.

I run an AthlonXP and steer people towards AMD systems left and right, but the Opteron is proving to be a very odd design.

How, and why exactly? Opteron is a rather conservative incremental design on Athlon core, nothing radically new except for the 64-bitness.

And as thus, it's not really even "version 1.0"

BTW, when calling someone to the mat for making blanket untrue statements, just contradicting their statement for not providing references isn't enough, unless you provide them yourself. It's a case of he-said she-said, and frankly, your word amounts to a hill of beans to me (as does the other guy).

I've got better things to do than try to prove someone like grandparent who has already made up his mind and won't listen to anyone, no matter the truth. Especially as it really is damn hard to find trustworthy results, any credible sources haven't touched this debate with a 10-foot pole.

But if you wish. Let's start with some SPECmark tests, you know the same Apple used to claim G5 was faster than anything else at the launch (Opteron scores were mysteriously missing, and they've later been accused of tampering with P4 scores as well).

SPECint_base 2000:
Dual G5 2.0GHz - 800
Opteron 148 (2.2GHz) - 1304
Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) - 1115

SPECint_rate_base 2000:
Dual G5 2.0GHz - 17.2
Opteron 148 (2.2GHz) - 15.1
Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) - 12.9

SPECfp_base 2000:
Dual G5 2.0GHz - 840
Opteron 148 (2.2GHz) - 1505
Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) - 1217

SPECfp_rate_base 2000:
Dual G5 2.0GHz - 15.7
Opteron 148 (2.2GHz) - 17.5
Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) - 13.6

So lookee what we have here. Dual G5 can barely hold it's own against single Opteron at rate tests and is completely decimated in base tests. I won't bother with dual opteron numbers, but they scale well and leave G5 behind every time. They're at spec.org for everyone to see.

So... ok, now you're probably yeah, sure, nice set of numbers but what about real world applications? Well. The fact still stands there aren't many, or any benchmarks out there that I trust but let's dig some of the trash anyway.

(mostly) favoring opteron:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1274637,00.as p
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,p g,8,00.asp

vastly favoring G5:
http://www.barefeats

http://www.barefeats.com/ IS ALL FUCKING ABOUT HOW FAST A MAC CAN GO, its a fucking BIASED source.

First off, you want to compare the same application to the extent you can, or is this a faulty methodology? By your logic, maybe they should've used Premiere Pro (which is far more stable and more powerful than its predecessor. Maybe you would like to compare ClarisWorks or OpenOffice instead?

Well, let's do a little examination of real benchmarks and use some deduction and estimation to get some better facts than you present. The first thing is this barefeats.com article comparing the dual G4 1GHz to various flavors of G5, including the dual G5. The Dual G5 scores 836 in the After Effects versus the Dual G4's score of 355. About 2.5x the performance. Great. Let's put that in our back pocket for now.

If one looks at the Mediaworkstation.com benchmarks for After Effects where they pit a dual G4 1.0GHz versus a dual Athlon MP1800+, the dual Athlons are nearly double the performance of the dual G4s in many benchmarks.

Now, a dual Athlon MP1800+ is limited not only by its lower bus speeds and non-integrated memory controller, but by its relative lack of internal registers as compared to the Opteron/Athlon64. You'd be lucky to get the equivalent performance of a P4 3.2GHz HT on the dual Athlon MP1800+ box. Yet the single-processor Athlon64/Opterons seems to be much faster than that P4 box according to PC World.

My point is that, if you want to compare your "gut feeling" based on extension of real benchmarks (versus your complete lack of evidence and questionable comparison methodology), I have the feeling that the dual G5 at best will approximately match the best single-processor Athlon64/Opteron configuration. That's a far cry from your claimed "trouncing" of the Athlon64 by the dual G5.

If you want to argue for the dual G5, why don't you simply state something such as the fact that FCP4 is, for now, the only editing program this side of a $30k Avid or $150k Discreet that will run on an average consumer-level PC? FCP is one of the de-facto standards in the editing world now. Regardless of the power of a computer, it could be a far more compelling reason for a certain niche of users to go Mac than Wintel.

The G5's Q3 scores tipped me off.. they're half of what they should be:

According to Bare Feats... it should get closer to 300 fps

makes me wonder about the other tests as well...

The G5 in these tests was running 10.2.7. Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) will, by all accounts, increase performance even more. For example, from this Bare Feats test:

"PANTHER PUNCH"
Meanwhile, here's some data on the speed increase that OS X "Panther" (10.3) will provide G5 owners once it's released. We ran Xbench 1.1 on a G5 1.8GHz with 10.3 beta build 7B49. Compared to 10.2.7 "Jaguar"....
....CPU score increased 40%
....Thread score increased 44%
....Memory score increased 38%

Dual G4's in laptops though are not out of the question.....

I really hope they do give us dual G4's in a Powerbook. It would make a fine desktop replacement, since the current crop falls short. There would, of course, need to be an Energy Saver preference to disable the 2nd processor on battery, and the OS would need to know how to do that dynamically, like BeOS could ten years ago or so. My first Powerbook could switch from 25 to 16MHz via a control panel...

Some are speculating that IBM is skipping 90nm manufacturing alltogether, and going straight for
60nm processes, so the G4 might have to last a while longer while they get that worked out.

I find it easy to believe considering that some of the hardware benchmarks are identical to another set of benchmarks on another site which uses its own specific test bundle... I wouldn't put too much faith in these graphs. Just pretend you didn't see it and wait for Jobs to announce it. Subtract 71.2% from the figures he cites, and that's the real performance we're looking at with 970

Think really hard about buying an iBook instead. I had the order in for a 12" PowerBook and changed it to be an iBook. Pretty glad I did.

Differences?

* Faster, ish
* Possibly a better screen, the iBook one is less than spectacular. Look at them side by side.
* iBook keys scratch the screen in transit. This is fucking annoying. Look to see if the PB does it.
* Combo drives, super drives blah de blah de blah doesn't bother me. I have a desktop machine for CD burning and a playstation to play DVD's.
* The mobility radeon in the iBook is quite possibly the better chip, but the PB can screen span. The iBook can screen span too but you need to hack the bios :(
* Price. Oh yes. Go work out how many gameboy SP's you can buy with the money you save from getting an iBook.

Dave

• a crippled G4 (no L3 cache) that barely edges out the iBook
• a video chipset that is much slower than the year-old 15" Powerbook's Radeon, in some cases no faster than the iBook
• $50 of extra RAM

The new Powerbooks that have the new Firewire (Firewire800, if you will) also have a standard Firewire port. Both original and Firewire800 devices can be plugged in at once, but as you posted, there is also an adapter to convert the newer port to original Firewire.

Surprisingly, I haven't seen much said about the possibility of much faster Firewire RAIDs. Using the adapter to have the Firewire800 port act as a second Firewire bus would get some great speeds.
BareFeats does a lot of work testing Firewire RAID setups. There should be some tests there once the new Powerbooks are more readily available.

I use a Wiebetech firewire super drive dock connected to an 80gig Seagate desktop drive with my Powerbook G4. The Super Drive Dock is simply an anodized aluminum enclosure containing a firewire bridge that attaches to a bare drive. It supplies power to the disk via firewire bus power. Very tight design.

In addition, Wiebetech's bridge is home-grown and a bit faster than most on the market.

Check it out.

Firewire certainly is up to snuff for video editing. With a 400MB/s bus speed, the limitation is with the drive itself.

Check out the comparitive review at barefeats in which they conclude that the WiebeTech product performs better than the competition.

Note that if you don't have firewire hardware on your box, you can get a PCI or Cardbus card to do it. There is a compatibility list at www.linux1394.org. I'm using one of the Belkin cards in my PC, and it works well.

Disclaimer, so you don't think I'm astroturfing: WiebeTech is my current consulting client.

Look up the Lightwave-Results I posted in the other Thread and see that a Dual-GHz G4 can very well keep up in CPU-crushing Raytracing even with a top notch (single, granted!) P4! And Dual Xeons aren't buyable in Shops just like that and they're definately not the cheapass PCs you guys say trounces any Mac easily! And yes, Newtek optimized for both for Altivec and SSE2! Ah yes, concerning optimizing: You do know that every CPU-consuming program is optimized for some CPU? Some are for both, others are just optimized for one (=usually the one they're made on!) There's no such thing as a simple compile! Intel's Compilers do auto-vectorizing for SSE2 because the P4s single CPU is so bad (see: First Benchmark-results when the P4 was released and the new compilers weren't used!) sparing the programmer of quite some work f.ex., that's compilers Apple doen't have yet!
Stuff that's just optimized for x86 is e.g. Unreal, stuff that's optimized for both is Lightwave, Quake3 and Photoshop, and oh my, that's exactly the Applications where Macs perform pretty good if not superior in some cases!
See f.ex. the Quake3 comparison in 640x480 on the very same barefeats page you quoted! It's still doing pretty well in 1024x768, but isn't it ironic that the G4 excels especially in resolutions that are more CPU- than bandwidth-bound?

Scorecard uses "iComp"

"The iCOMP value is the weighted geometric mean of four benhcmarks;

ZD(Ziff-Davis) Bench - 68% 16-bit Whetstone - 2% SPECint92 - 25% SPECfp92 - 5%"

"Scorecard" shows the G4 and Athlon 2600 dead even at 89% of the fastest processor, The P4 2.8. That is sort of funny, considering ZD bench which represents 68% of the weighted mean of iComp is not available on the Mac.

Here are some additional resources using more modern benchmarks:

Benchmarks using Spec2000 instead of the woefully obsolete Spec92.

Comparison of The Dual G4 to other platforms in after effects rendering

Here is some raw data from the obsolete 16-bit Whetstone which shows the G4 not even able to match a Pentium II clock for clock.

This comparison shows how the G4 compares to a variety of rivals.

This shows that under most conditions, the SDR equiped Dual G4 is faster than than the DDR version. Meaning the 1.25 GHz G4 is crippled with DDR. Which means the numbers from the other benchmark links will not scale linearly. The Dual 1.25 G4 is actualy slower clock for clock than the G4 with SDR.

Also refrence Ars Technica's Seti benchmark showing that a Dual G4 1 Ghz produces work units at the same speed that a Dual PIII 1 Ghz.

Has anyone found any other Benchmark comparisons of the G4 (besides the single photoshop benchmark on Apple's website) that might shed some light on the debate?

So, choose whatever platform you like, but be informed about what you are paying for.

You buy a mac, you buy it because you like OS X, which is far and away the nicest OS out there right now. You do not buy a mac because of performance, as anyone who follows the links can very plainly see.

Scorecard uses "iComp"

"The iCOMP value is the weighted geometric mean of four benhcmarks;

ZD(Ziff-Davis) Bench - 68% 16-bit Whetstone - 2% SPECint92 - 25% SPECfp92 - 5%"

"Scorecard" shows the G4 and Athlon 2600 dead even at 89% of the fastest processor, The P4 2.8. That is sort of funny, considering ZD bench which represents 68% of the weighted mean of iComp is not available on the Mac.

Here are some additional resources using more modern benchmarks:

Benchmarks using Spec2000 instead of the woefully obsolete Spec92.

Comparison of The Dual G4 to other platforms in after effects rendering

Here is some raw data from the obsolete 16-bit Whetstone which shows the G4 not even able to match a Pentium II clock for clock.

This comparison shows how the G4 compares to a variety of rivals.

This shows that under most conditions, the SDR equiped Dual G4 is faster than than the DDR version. Meaning the 1.25 GHz G4 is crippled with DDR. Which means the numbers from the other benchmark links will not scale linearly. The Dual 1.25 G4 is actualy slower clock for clock than the G4 with SDR.

Also refrence Ars Technica's Seti benchmark showing that a Dual G4 1 Ghz produces work units at the same speed that a Dual PIII 1 Ghz.

Has anyone found any other Benchmark comparisons of the G4 (besides the single photoshop benchmark on Apple's website) that might shed some light on the debate?

So, choose whatever platform you like, but be informed about what you are paying for.

You buy a mac, you buy it because you like OS X, which is far and away the nicest OS out there right now. You do not buy a mac because of performance, as anyone who follows the links can very plainly see.

Averages: sec
Athlon MP 38
Athlon XP 48.75
Dual G4 56.75
Xserve G4 57.25
2GHz P4 58.5

So yes, the single Athlon is about 16% faster, the dual Athlon is about 50% faster.

That benchmark was not set up to test the fastest line of AMD and Intel CPU's, and it's still a graphics benchmark. There is another benchmark here where the new dual 1GHz Power Mac (DDR) gets beat by the older one due to the smaller L3 cache. AMD and Intel are going to both make some huge improvements before Apple updates its line again. I like Apple but they need a cheaper/faster architecture. Maybe if they put enough work into tweaking OSX while they are on limited hardware it will be an impressive product when they do move it to a real platform.

Like here where the dual G4 gets schooled by the 1.6GHz Athlon in photoshop?

Add 20% to these numbers.

Apple again shines... but only in their traditional strengths.

They already have a processor benchmark, its called SPECint or SPECfp, and i dont see any apple results on that. Probably a reason for that, check this link I think that will give you a bit of insight into why they don't publish benchmarks, I mean even with their Altivec improvments they still lag far far behind AMD, as apple says, it doesn't matter how fast your chip runs, or how many instructions per second it does, it matters how fast it runs applications and for how much. And clearly the G4 is loosing this battle.

Bare Feats has some benchmarks:

http://www.barefeats.com/pb8.html

As does PowerBookCentral:

http://www.powerbookcentral.com/features/ibookvspb g42.shtml

And of course Macworld has benchmarked the machines:

http://www.macworld.com

With this new upgrade, suddenly the market value of my G4/350 is improved significantly. It's upgradeable to a GHz, and faster as new processors come on the market, according to PowerLogix.

I am very curious to see benchmarks on this stuff. For example I wonder how well a 1 GHz upgrade to my system with a 100 MHz system bus would stand up against a current G4/933 with a 133 MHz bus. (It would be unfair to pit it against a current shipping GHz machine as they have two processors).

I will also still be stuck with ATA/66 (it's ATA/100 in the new models I think), 2x AGP (vs. 4x in the new models). In the my field (music) I don't believe the ATA and AGP are a big issue, and I don't know if a 33% bus speed increase will translate to a big performance improvement.

I'll be keeping an eye on Bare Feats, an awesome Mac benchmarking site that answers a lot of those little nagging questions about performance.

The faster your scratch disk is, the less time PS spends pageing, this can add up to over a 30 second savings on complex filters or actions. Check out barefeats.com for benchmark tests related to graphics a video programs.

I'm sorry, how is this insightful? Because it bashes Miscrosoft? Halo hadn't even been released for the Mac (or any other platform). Microsoft didn't kill it, they simply released the X-Box version first to give it some leverage against Nintendo and Sony in the console market.

Of course there will be Windows and Mac versions of Halo. Microsoft likes money too much not to make them (and they have an investment in Windows and Apple too, remember?).

And Shake isn't a game. Large studios depend on it. And most of all they depend on its speed. Even the fastest PowerMac can't compete with a quad Xeon (Dual G4s barely manage to edge out a single-CPU Athlon, and are crushed by the much cheaper Athlon MPs). If Apple kills Shake on the fastest platforms, it kills Shake completely. Studios have deadlines to meet and they certainly aren't going to meet them if they're forced to use Macs for their render nodes. It's not a matter of price or even bang for the buck. It's a matter of bang, period.

I work in animation and post-production and I know what I'm talking about. Half the artists don't even know which OS they are running, and the other half doesn't care. They just want the thing to render as fast as possible. And if you don't believe me (it seems that I'm a troll for not applauding Apple's scorched earth tactics), check out this post.

Discreet, Eyeon and Silicon Grail probably can't belive their luck right now.

RMN
~~~

Good point. This claim is silly. Not even a single hard drive with its hard wired short connections can do 1,000M bite/sec.

You can get speeds like that out of a setup of hard drives by (of course) doing RAID -- multiple hard drives arrayed together can give the enduser 128M Bytes/sec (1,000M bits/sec). I would recommend one of the new FireWire PCI cards with multiple independent buses. RAID on the cheap.

http://www.barefeats.com/pentium.html.

I used to have some hope that the AIM alliance could put out some better chips, but quite frankly, after seeing the story, I feel that they are too far behind at this point to compete. Mac users deserve something better. I'm not sure anymore if OS X makes up for this much difference in CPU power.

I think that I am totally ready to have Apple move over to x86. How much farther ahead does Intel have to get before something is changed?

Actually, I'm kinda depressed about the whole thing. If anyone has anything that would cheer me up, I'd sure like to hear it...

You do the PPC injustice. The benchmarks here show that while you'll save a couple bucks with an x86, a properly tuned G4 system is superior.

And don't pull that "Total Cost of Ownership" crap. TCO is based very heavily on the previous experience and knowledge of the users. If they have Mac experience, they'll have less trouble with Macs. If they have Windows experience, they'll have less trouble with Windows. The fact of the matter is that TCO is a valid argument, which is probably why you are trying to derail it. Go on eBay, and you can find three-year old Macs being sold for 50% of what they were purchased originally. How does your x86 stand up to that?

Besides that, OS X is so easy to use and rock solid, that the time you will save using it over the course of the year, you will be able to purchase at least one other x86 -- at least if your time is worth money. Macs are awesome machines -- that is why Apple is still in business.

USB 2.0 versus FireWire (MacCentral Online) -- Solid article. Check it out.

Face-off between USB and FireWire Flash Card readers -- "Translation: Do NOT expect the gap between FireWire and USB readers to close when USB 2.0 readers start shipping. Do expect FireWire to be updated soon to achieve 800Mbit/sec... possibly 1600Mbit/sec, Moral: Use FireWire any time the device can handle the speed." (Somewhat useful.)

Will USB or FireWire connect with consumers (CNET) -- "In the end, FireWire may take the lead for storage devices, scanners, video cameras and consumer electronic devices, while USB continues to dominate mice, keyboards and other peripherals." (Comments: Some fluff, but useful.)

USB 2.0 versus 1394 (Japanese) -- I don't read Japanese, but this is an article comparing USB 2.0 and 1394 . . .

Tom's Hardware Comparison (via Google) -- "In the FireWire versus USB debate, currently it is no contest. USB is cheap and well suited for inexpensive devices like keyboards and mice, while IEEE1394 is far, far faster, more user friendly and a bit more robust, but is also a little more expensive to implement."

SCSI versus IDE, FireWire, USB, etc. (Mac Buyer's Guide) -- "Indeed, Apple specifically recommends against FireWire drives, for use with its high-end video editor, Final Cut Pro." (Comments: Other interesting stuff is in this article. Check it out.)

Actually, with the Geforce2MX, The new G4s get 80fps, much closer now.

http://www.barefeats.com/graphiX.htm

And on the MTU issue, why do you care how big a network packet you send? How does this help 99.9% of users? I think you were just looking for some big sounding acronym to toss arround.

And that third party software you talk about simply adjusts a setting in OpenTransport, which is part of the OS, thus the tweeker prorgam is freeware....

The MTU is probably my biggest example of why I hate Windows and hate Mac more. On all the unix boxes, you type ``ifconfig eth0 mtu 1400'' or you can set the MSS on the default route (either fix the problem as they both do about the same thing). Under windows, you have to make a registry entry to fix the problem. With MacOS, you have to hunt your way around extremely little documentation and finally after reading mailing lists you find some random guy selling his little shareware tweaker.

That just seems like the MacOS way. Tons of annoying shareware for things that should just work and be in the distribution.

And FUD = "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt". How is Apple spreading any of this? I watched the keynote, and Steve Jobs was very clear about the dual G4's being the fastest PERSONAL computers out there for using Photoshop

Not to mention most of the non-apple-done benchmarks I've seen put the G4s at a significantly lower performance level than even middle-of-the-road x86 chips. Try here, can't find some of the better comparisons I've seen.

If what you really meant was "Don't support Linux" then you are correct, but there is no ecomomic reason for them to do so at this time.

What about 64 bit PCI (standard, backward compatible to the regular 32 bit you find in most PC's), Gigabit Ethernet (backward compatable to 10/100), AGP, PC100 RAM (granted they use th 3-2-2 or better only), USB periferals, etc do you find propritary.

Considering that smaller, faster CPUs are running circles around chips with more MHz tacked on to their name, we need a new standard in selling computers to consumers.. something similar to how Rambus is listed as PC600/PC800 and DDR RAM is PC2100 (because it's inherently faster even though its clockspeed is slower). If say, a PIII runs at 800MHz it would be sold as a "CPU800" -- and a 500MHz G4 would then be listed as a "CPU850" or so, taking into consideration the architecture performance. Such a naming convention may help even the gap between all competitors as long as they are all tested against the same benchmark. Notice the speed differences between these desktops with wildly different clock speeds (400MHz G4, 800MHz Athlon, dual-600MHz PIII):
Real world speed test web page

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Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }

Well, the MHz vs. performance issue has finally been tested. Notice the speed differences between a 400MHz G4 vs. an 800MHz Athlon vs. a dual-600 PentiumIII system. Guess who comes out on top most of the time in real-world tests?
Bare Feats speed comparison of three high speed desktop systems

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Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }

Too many users feel this need to be loyal to one platform or the other, without even bothering to look elsewhere to comparison shop. Unless you've seen firsthand, I suggest you not slam any platform - if you haven't considered, you don't REALLY know what you can get for that price in the x86 market, DO YOU?

Actually, I have used with both platforms for graphics development, and was underwhelmed by the performance of the WinTel offerings. I terms of rendering speeds, reliability and stability, my G4 is easily the machine for greater productivity.

I also agree with Adobe CEO John Warnock's assertion that the G4 is the greatest Photoshop machine ever built.

Check out this Barefeats article for a nice price performance comparison of the G4 vs. WinTel offerings.

The Mac isn't the best at everything (PC's have many more high end 3D offerings for example) but it's the best at the tasks I use it for. That's reason enough for me to stick with Apple.

AMD does have a winner in its Athlon series. Its performance even outweighs setups that utilize dual Pentiums. It even gives the Motorola/IBM G4 a run for the money. According to Barefeats.com, the Athlon holds its own well against a 400 MHz G4 Macintosh (Yosemite motherboard) and a dual-600 MHz PIII WinNT machine.

Bare Feats comparison of Athlon, Dual PIIIs, and G4


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Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }