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Mac Rants
There's a piece by Scott Wasson regarding the claims of Apple, of late, and his...feelings on it. It's a pretty ranty piece, as he says in the beginning, but it's a good discussion starting piece - even tho' I disagree with him to a degree.
I swear that I must be the only one that remembers the days of impenatrable Mac cases. the whole point of the apple case design way back when was to make it so the end user wouldn't be able to easily get into it. they wanted you to go to a certified apple repair tech (like I was at the time.) the really, really old macs required torx with 12" shafts to get open without breaking or forcing anything. anyone else remember those days? of slowly removing the power supplies just so you could add memory? what a pain.
Sometimes I think everyone forgets that apple's "easy access" case design is a complete about face from their previous efforts. I don't always think pulling a 180 is good, since that means you were going half-assed to start with.
that, and from an old crusty apple tech... pretty cases do not a powerful impressive machine make (apple OR x86.)
EOM
In my case, it has to do with what I do with computers.. Being that I develop web applications, I'd typically have a Linux box, which I do my development on, a Windows box, mostly for testing browsers, and a Mac box, for Photoshop and the like.. Admittedly, I could use Photoshop in Windows, but it's a matter of preference. Additionally, I do DV in my spare time, so Firewire is a must. And then there's the problem of portability.. I can't be carrying 3 machines around with me all the time, laptop or not, and reducing it to 2 by using VMWare is not something I want to do.
So, with all those things in mind, the perfect platform for me ends up being MacOS X. I get to use all the unix tools I'm used to (in a better GUI), I have IE, Netscape and Mozilla all in the same box, and I have Photoshop and all my DV tools. Throw that into a tiny notebook (the iBook) along with Airport, and I have a pretty kick-ass all-in-one solution.
The value of a computer depends on an individual's needs.. It just so happens that a typical user can get everything he or she wants in a cheap PC (albeit less aesthetically pleasing), for less than your average Mac.
Sure. Dnetc. I believe that has been heavily optimized for this P4 here at work (at least, according to the changelogs).
And this beautiful 1.7GHz P4 does around 2.6Mkeys/s. My 400MHz G4 at home does 3.6Mkeys/s.
That give you a nice benchmark?
ls:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
-- John Carmack (2001-06-04)
-jfedor
To what degree do you disagree with Damage? His argument against the article he references is pretty convincing. The "Decision Matrix" the guy uses in the original article is full of mistakes and far from an objective comparison of Macs vs. PCs. The original article's author is also one of those people who *still insist* the G4 is faster than the Pentium 4 (and he conveniently "forgets" about the Athlon!) Damage calls the guy to the carpet over these things, and it's hard to find holes in what he says.
So, how do you disagree with him?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
/. has defnitly gone downhill in their news. A this article was just baseless ranting and very ill informed and even the biased link the author was ranting against was A LOT less biased and informative than this crazyness. What is going on here? I thought i. was a forum for geeky information not articles dedicated to whiney people with chips on their shoulders. Please /. you recent Mac bashing has gotten ridiculous.
This is silly.
Apple uses the PPC architecture.
IBM uses the PPC architecture in their RS/6000 and AS/400 boxen.
IBM even provides some of the PPC chips to Apple for their boxen.
If you've ever considered serving with AIX, OS/400, or Linux running as a virtual server under OS/400, then there ought to be nothing wrong with buying a commodity box from Apple and serving with Darwin / OS X.
Yes, the photoshop benchmark gets dragged out against windows, because it's a real world use.
I wonder what you -one-mouse-button haters would say to an AS/400-RS/6000-G4-dual athlon bake off.
Having covered Apple and the Macintosh community with a top-three visited Macintosh resource site and run my own Mac OS X site, I find it silly that the inference is that this discussion doesn't take place every single day.
Discussions amongst people who find Mac vs. Windows, RISC vs. CISC, Apple vs. anyone else cuz Apple sux, or any of these types of completely "to your own taste" topics are really sad when they are cast as "a good discussion starting piece" when the starting point is years in the past, and the journey has been beaten to death.
The G4 vs. Pentium tests are not for /.ers, and you all know that to be true - they are for the Mac zealots (zealot, n. - one who engages warmly in any cause, and pursues his object with earnestness and ardor) and for such magazines as PC Magazine where Apple efforts to keep its moderate mindshare by using the trade show equivalent of the "bully pulpit."
When "[Adobe Photoshop 6 is] an application highly optimized for the G4 and known to have problems on the Pentium 4" is used against the G4 and its apparent ease of exploitation and quality of performance at particular clock speeds and the article gets /.'d, it makes me wonder how low the individual requirements of objectivity and lack of bias have shrunk amongst the "digital learned"...
Apple is beginning to support two-button mice. Read this article. Or, copy and paste:
, 00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39773
The Mac Team's machines run our game noticably slower than the guys running hard-hitting Athlons, but I have a (dual) 800Mhz P3, and the G4 450's seem to keep pace with it reasonably on our game builds.
One thing I will say it this: the Mac GUI feels faster to me than the Explorer Shell on Win2K...
The rant lays out a good question, then. What do you use to gauge value if not Photoshop benchmarks and CPU MHz?
My first intuitive guess would have to be dollars, but then people have the unfortunate habit of trying to get the absolute damn cheapest product out there, which does nothing for quality and performance.
We would need a value per dollar metric to compare systems, then. What value?
Features? That gets hard to compare, as different people value different options, and some people don't even know what features they value until they grow into the system.
Then there is the hard to even see metric, quality . Fit, finish, durability, ease of use, etc. Short of using a system for a couple of days, most laptops/PCs are superficially the same, until you need to open the box, swap video cards, add a new hard drive, etc.
Performance? At least you can use time as a measure, but what would you be measuring with time? Photoshop? Office? It would be twisted, but how about comparing a Windows benchmark running under Virtual PC vs a Windows benchmark on a Windows machine? Given that the virtualization would take a performance hit, you could apply some scalar or multiplier to try to normalize the scores.
I dunno. I know I bought a Mac because it looked good and felt good, and that has no bearing on MHz or performance.
GPL Deconstructed
Trying to declare that your machine isn't really slower isn't very productive, even if it's true. First, it isn't something most users will ever hear about, or understand. Second, it's just far too easy to rig the game in your favor, so performance claims by either side become pretty worthless. But third, and most importantly, performance just doesn't matter anymore to the vast majority of users. Everything out there is more than fast enough. Nobody (almost) buys a car based on top speed; most people don't even buy based on engine power -- people buy cars based on design, comfort, handling, safety, gas mileage, extra features, etc.
Apple clearly wants people to buy computers the same way. The great industrial design and things like iMovie, iTunes and OS X, with its stunning user interface, make this clear. Apple wants people to buy based on user experience, and on what they, as non-geeks, can do with their computers. Sure, it's possible to edit digital video on a Wintel machine. But is it as easy as iMovie? The capability is worthless to an average user if it's too difficult to use.
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It is not a bad thing when someone hits a group right bang smack between the eyes with the facts causing them to gibber impotently as their ideological sacred cows are slaughtered.
McWeeniedom is much like membership of Scientology they take all your money and give you something in return that only members of the cult call 'advanced technology'.
The laughable comparison chart is as ridiculous as the folk flaming "go do Comp Arc. 101 and learn about the difference between CISC and RISC". Then the curious statement is made that the G4 is faster than Pentium 4 despite the slow clock speed because the G4 RISC instructions do more per cycle. Clearly the several people who made the statement would fail their comp arch course. The RISC strategy was to reduce the complexity of individual instructions, specifically avoiding the type of complex instructions that cause pipeline faults. The other part of RISC was to simplify design to allow faster to market exploitation of the latest Fab.
In short to defend the G4 the traditional RISC/CISC argument is turned back to front. You go to RISC architecture because it allows you to push for higher clock speeds faster.
There are plenty of good benchmarks around. SPECMarks, CERN Units, MFlops, etc. and most of them are cross platform. Any benchmark that fixes on a particular piece of code that was hand coded in assembler for one platform is utterly bogus.
The biggest flaw in the article however is that the majority of the marks are given for allowing the user to select their own configuration. The whole point about the PC is that you get to choose exactly the configurtation and price point you want.
So scoring 1 point for a crappy Iomega Zip drive I would never use is beside the point. Anyone who wants to pay Iomega for their overpriced faulty trash can do so. Compact Flash is rapidly approaching the cost of ZIP disks, is smaller, more reliable and has capacities up to 1Gb.
Other folk have pointed to the bogosity of giving the Apple 2 points for L3 cach and the PCs 0.5 points for a 400MHz system bus. But the fundamental error is that the processor ratings are on the basis of benchmarks that test the whole system but are then applied to the processor alone. So on the basis that an Apple was found to be equivalent to last years model of PC on a dubious benchmark the Apple gets 12.5 points and the PCs get 10.5 or less.
The 802.11B scores are also bogus, to enable the apple you need to buy an extra card, to enable the PC you need to get an extra card. The only difference is that only Apple can supply the card for the G4.
The stupidest of all is the 'virus' line. The only reason that the Mac has not been plagued is that the population of Macs is too low to allow contagion to spread. If the Mac ever became popular again it would be slaughtered. All this reflects is the fact that virsu writers have abandoned the Mac along with almost every other software maker. If you really want to be guaranteed Virus free go run Open Genera or Multics.
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