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Mac vs. PC Digital Photography Comparison
An anonymous reader writes "Rob Galbraith posted a comparison among two Macs and two PCs. Both a high-end Mac and PC are included with somewhat surprising results given the number of Mac zealots who will claim otherwise... optimized for PC, Mac support second, Photoshop is faster, yada, yada, yada."
Thought it said digital pornography comparison. I've never clicked on a Slashdot story so fast in my life!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Surprising? I think not. Every /. reader here knows that Apple has been dragging its ass in the sand in the processor race due to Motorola's lack of money/research/carbonated beverages, and this isn't going to change until IBM gets around to releasing the "G5" architecture, probably using multiple cores on chip. So this is all old hat until then, really.
I submitted this same story around the same time and being the rabid mac hater that I am, I still managed to try not to make the submission sound baised and what happens, they post the one submitted by an anonymous reader which is overly rude and biased.
although a lot of the ones posted by micheal seem to be submitted by anonymous readers and other unlinkified names, so perhaps he just rewrites them and doesnt accredit the submission to anyone..
And especially in terms of this article, would productivity improve if the Gimp was used on, say, a Linux box?
--sexy gal
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Sure they appear to be slow, but that's because they're so fast that time slows down as a result of general relativity. Yeah that's it. I can't believe that you mindless Pee Cee thugs didn't know that.
Morons.
--Steve Jobs
MAC Vs. PC is the same as the silly East side West Side rap Thing, I have worked on both machines in photoshop for years they are exactly the same the PC just crashes more than the MAC on files over 100 MB I find. but That is probebly a programe related glitch.
There are a few more benchmarks about PC Vs fastest Macs. PCs always win the last 1-2 years.
I believe that Apple should do SOMETHING. Maybe move to AMD Opteron or something, or sh*t on Motorola to get their act together. But they have to do something, the clock is ticking!
Mac zealot here, wanted to know where the PC zealots were. I also bumped into the VAX/VMS zealots as well, they were hanging with the System V zealots, who were, in turn also hanging out with the BSD zealots.
I don't care what computer you use, why should you care what I use? Ahhh, PC zealot. In case you must know, i have a PowerBook G4, an RDI Powerlite, and a Sun Ultra Workstation.
...with something that is handled by software? I thought this was going to be a review of image manipulation quality. Instead we get this pissing match regarding mere algorithm speed, and not any final output analysis. This is a worse comparision than those done by Consumer Reports. Then again, he might be qualified to work for the FDA now.
The fastest dual processor Mac has been soundly thumped by one of the fastest single processor PCs. If this report had included a dual processor PC, the PC's margin of victory could have been even greater (at least in the multitasking tests, and for other PC software that may be optimized for multiple processors). Even the Dell, a modestly equipped desktop by current standards, matches or bests the dual 1.25GHz desktop Mac in numerous benchmarks. And the recently discontinued Powerbook G4/800 trails by a significant margin throughout.
There are countless articles on this subject. We know the PC's are faster. In some cases signficantly faster.
But there are a variety of reasons for choosing a machine and platform, speed is not necessarily only the thing that comes into play.
For example, I, for one, just how long the battery on that super 1337 Alienware notebook lasts. It's probably not anywhere close to the Powerbook.
Oh well.
But doesn't anyone else see that this is pointless? Use what you like to use......
No and no.
I gather that GIMP 2.0 will fix that particular problem at some stage, when 2.0 will be released is another question...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If your life as a digital photographer revolves around menial tasks such as catalogging zillions of photos, sure, get a PC. But if you actually take decent photos and make something of them, get a Mac. Where are all the output and retouching related benchmarks? I want tests of RGB-->CMYK conversion, unsharp masks, gaussians, color correction (white/black levels, contrast, brightness, etc,) and other tools photographers actually use to prepare their photos for publishing...
Have the slashdot editors just decided to post only repeats in some kind of sarcastic, like, thing?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What on earth has this got to do with Linux? The article is about Mac's and PC's, OSX and XP. Duh.
okay if you can still play MP3's and run photoshop , who cares about which system is better ? Futhermore I have seen many rich guys with top tech machines that cant design to save there lives, there creative output rivals that of yack puke , but a guy with natural talent could make much more asthetically pleasing work on a 486 running photoshop 2, so shouldt the real debate be on does technolguy make up for bad asthetics or color blindness ?
" XP is better all around and should be the desktop Linux is trying to be"
That's a troll right?
you think Linux should aim for a UI that Microsoft outsourced to Fisher Price?..
PC's do not have correct color output, and never will. No matter high end the PC, the colors never look "right" or balenced on the screen.
That's why if you ever go to a magazine's or newspaper's office, you will never see any layout or photowork being done on PC's, because the colors just aren't balenced. The only two systems I have seen get this right are Macs and Sgi's, and that is why they are still so widely used!
Even if people use PC's for processing work, professionals always go over their images on a mac, just to see if it looks "right".
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
You can buy diffrent laptops from diffrent companies. There are probably hundreds of laptops on the market now from Transmeta powered toshiba librito which can get up to 14 hours of battery life, to devices like yours which are insanley powerfull.
You can't get a 14 hour mac, and you can't get mac as powerfull as your alienware notebook.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A single company with a proprietary box vs. the PC world with huge third party support and development. That's like a technology race between a dictatorship and a capitalist state. The outcome is obvious. It's just a matter of time.
There will be plenty of time for smoking doobies when your living in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER.
Macs are sooo warm, fuzzy, and cute! Who needs raw performance when your Mac can make SUCH a fashion statement. Take that Micheal Dell!
All this prooves is a P4 with hyper threading is faster than slower PPC processers!
Where are objective results??? Would a 3ghz mac keep up with a P4?
>you think Linux should aim for a UI that Microsoft outsourced to Fisher Price?..
Who's the troll now?
I don't generally buy the fastest machine on the block, but Apple seems to be really falling behind. Their answer seems to have been to ship all Power Mac G4 towers as dual processor. But two slower processors are not as useful as one fast processor. And the heat sinks and noise on those G4 towers are even more ridiculous than on the Pentium 4's.
My "terribly slow" Dual 1 Ghz Macintosh is limited by its slowest part... me.
I keep the CPU meter running in the dock, and its twin towers of darkeness mock me..."what's the matter, buddy, can't even feed two glacial G4's? We're just sitting here, at 20% of capacity, while you try to decide which Actionscript to incorrectly code next..."
Even when I'm saving giant Photoshop files, checking 14 e-mail accounts and loading web pages into three different browsers (IE, Chimera, Safari), it still has one or two little dark blocks at the top of each meter. Probably just to piss me off.
Disclaimer: If I was a 3D or video artist, a 10% increase in speed could free up an hour a day. Since I'm not, even a 100% increase in speed would just mean my computer would have half as much to do while it waited for my sorry ass.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
What's so great about a win 95 desktop with KDE aesthetics? The hardware support is at best mediocre, even the most rabid MS boosters admit that. Stability is a hit-or-miss proposition, some people such as yourself have great luck, others have nothing but problems.
All in all a significant step down from win 2k, once fully patched a pretty good OS. (This from a FreeBSD, Slack and Gentoo user.)
Does it even compare to Photoshop where professionals are concerned?
Short answer? No.
And especially in terms of this article, would productivity improve if the Gimp was used on, say, a Linux box?
You're joking, right? Linux can barely even display fonts properly.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Don't make me come over there and kick your ass
Good point!
Every P4 I've purchased with XP has had its drives formatted within 20 minutes!
(WinXP legal serial numbers for sale...)
Win2000 is much better than XP... XP is just pure bloat!
Cyan is the absence of red, Yellow is the absence of blue, and magenta is the absense of green. Why is it so hard to convert colors?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Windows has had ICC support for at least 7 years, when windows 95 came out.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I looked at this thread and thought "here we go" expecting a huge flame war... but it's not - seriously weird huh? Where are the death threats from Mac users? (NOT a troll, I have been threatened with death by Mac users - true.)
Not until you realise that this story isn't on apple.slashdot.org. Had it been so, all posts that were not mac positive would be modded as flamebait, troll or offtopic. This is a personal observation based on personal experience.
BTW I own an iBook which I recently bought. My attitute to Apple has changed recently I must admit, however I have not threatened to "kick someone's ass" or kill them for critisising my choice.
I think this would be more interesting if the benchmark included a usabilty benchmark between teh two systems.
Meaning, start to finish, how long it took to setup each computer to be a good digital photography workstation, including color matching, scanner setup, etc. Plus, an examination of workflow on each system. Plus an examination on how much the operating system acted as a hinderance to actually getting work done.
Then I'd trust a benchmark. Processor speed and computational speed only extend so far. Windows vs. Mac is not a speed issue, but a usability and interface design issue. Regardless of speed, Mac OS X is more usable than Windows. It puts less obstacles to getting work done than Windows does.
You can't examine "performance" without measuring the performer's productivity, as that has as much to do with how fast a given system is as the processor speed.
PC's do have correct color output, you just have to calibrate the card plus the monitor. Todays videocards all have software calibration tools for colors. Photoshop on the PC also lets you calibrate your monitor when you first start the program.
FYI: a lot of paperfocussed designers are already moved to PC's.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
But there are a variety of reasons for choosing a machine and platform, speed is not necessarily only the thing that comes into play.
How about low price? No, I guess not. How about the ability to run Quark XPress natively? Oh, is that not important?
How about a non-crippled DDR implementation? Is that not important, either?
Damn. Well, at least you have instant friends if you buy a mac.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Well, I would imagine that someone who's job actually involved taking pictures would take a lot of them and look for that 'perfect' one. Ever see 'behind the scenes' documentaries about fashion photographers? They have cameras like machine-guns. "*SNAP-SNAP-SNAP-SNAP* gorgeous baby! *SNAP-SNAP-SNAP-SNAP*".
Anyway, why do you say that you should get a mac if you want to make 'great art'? PCs are just faster all around, the only reason to get a mac is because you like the interface more. It won't make you more productive unless you're so inflexable as to be unable to uable to function in a slightly diffrent environment.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Okay, wait, so they compared a 3 GHz processor with a 1.25 GHz processor? Even though it's dual, it won't be used by everything that he does.. OS X itself uses the Duals, as does Photoshop, but his digicam software may not.
;)
Regardless, it really comes down to a personal choice. Are you strong enough to make the right one?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
...which (shock! horror!) isn't available for Windows. Nor have I found a worthwhile substitute.
well sure, 99.99% of the time the computer isn't doing anything, but even a few miliseconds shaved of something like opening a new window feels nice.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
As someone who studied photojournalism at RIT (I still prefer working with b/w prints in my basement darkroom), but ended up in the computer biz, I read your comparison article with interest.
I won't bother arguing the stats, because I concur that potential doesn't matter, real world performance in the tasks that you do on a daily basis is what is important to you.
I will say that usability is as important as raw benchmarks; I happen to find Macs more usable. Any time I spend struggling with a computer is time lost when it comes to getting my work done.
But the real point of my post is to ensure that folks here who are using Macs are aware that Apple has some very interesting machines due out before the end of the year that are surely going to garner attention in the speed department. Out goes the Motorola G4, in comes the PPC970 from IBM -- it is 100% compatible with any software your G4 runs, it just happens to benefit from the serious horsepower that IBM has developed for their high-end workstations and servers.
Yes, Macs are currently a bit slower than their PC counterparts at some tasks, but they remain more of a pleasure to use. Soon, you will have the best of both worlds in terms of ease of use, stylish design, and speed.
Danger, danger!
;P
.TIF files through Photoshop to adjust the resolution. I was amazed when it finished the complete run in just over an hour on my AMD Athlon 1200. Regardless of your choice of platform, today's machines have pretty amazing processing power.
The last time I posted a Mac vs. PC comparison (backing up my clain with a web link to the comparison), I got modded down my the Mac cultists
[The site quoted in this post has much the same result as my findings, BTW].
When I was doing more film work, I had to run approx 8,000 x 8mb
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Linux doesn't have a UI RETARD! Get a clue!
Linux is nothing more than a kernel!
I don't care if something is "demonstrably", "good", "bad", "wrong" or "right" by your subjective standards-- I'm 100% in support of 'giving people what they want' if:
Do you really have a problem with that?
Patent questions aside, I would think that: If CMYK support is currently a vital requirement for any graphics program to even be considered useable by a large number of professional artists, then whatever programming time would be 'squandered' on this "inferior" (but obviously useful) technology would contribute much to many artists, and in turn to the success of Free software.
If Adobe truly holds a stranglehold patent on a monopolistic technology, then I'd also be jumping up and down saying the printing industry should open up and accept a free "technology" (RGB RGB, rah rah rah). Even better if it's as good as the untouchable one. You say it's superior? Hooray!
In any case, friend, I think you should take a chill pill.
Then, tomorrow, go start your new business: "AC's Gimpy Print Shop" (all CMYK services cheerfully declined!).
Good luck with your new endeavour!
Sincerely,
SYR
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
The amount of support I have to give these people is minimal and is all application-related.
The other area I encounter non-technical people is the PC world and, of course, the level of support required is much higher. Each successive edition of Windows is more cluttered as standard, and the learning curve is often a major irritation for busy professionals. Things often don't just work out of the box. Only last week I spent a frustrating hour just trying to get two W2k notebooks to communicate properly over ethernet, whereas I don't even have to think about adding Appletalk boxes. OK so I'm stupid, but how many other people are out there who are just as stupid as I am, and also need to work with computers?
In short, I see no real change in the long term situation, which is:
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Here are some links:
0 /rtr844270.html
o mp/articleshow?artid=34101659
http://www.forbes.com/business/newswire/2003/01/1
http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s761479.htm
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/c
You are right on all counts, but I will never give up my G4, and I own/use 5 different archs. I wish the Apple hardware was faster, I wish it was cheaper, but it still rocks.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
all sorts of good excuses tonight, caffiene, nicotine and late night will do this to people. watch out, you could be next. . . . .
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
I think this one goes to show more the fact that the current mac processors have such a lame memory bus than anything else. Most of the tests involve moving around GB to no end and there the PCs have a clear advantage (thanks to Motorola's ignorance of things like DDR memory and the like).
The crippled DDR support of modern PowerMacs (and the last Powerbooks) helps only when doing a variety of memory tasks simultaneously, as the processors are still fed at single speed.
Linux would rule if I had 30 years to life in prison on DMCA charges. I would finally have time to configure it, or write a winmodem driver.
AMD has the same problem Apple and motorola used to have. When comparisons were made between the G3/G4 and the pentiums of the time, apple/Motorola said that MHz isn't everything to CPU performance. Unfortunately motorola stopped worrying about MHz and apple has tried to avoid comparisons. Avoiding the issue however is not the correct solution. Waiting for Motorola to come out with something new is not working. Apple needs to start shopping for another vendor for it's processors. Porting OS X to another processor is possible, but who knows how long apple will wait with Motorola.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
In addition to the article it would have been interesting if someone put together a test and compared "back for the buck" ratios of different platforms.
I recently bought an iBook and a Dell laptop for about the same price. The iBook lags behind in almost all applications and also takes longer to boot. I guess in the end, it is the design that you pay for when buying a Mac.
December 2002 I was asked to do a migration for a printing-company, where it's new PowerMac G4 dual 1GHz needed to be migrated from OS 9 to OS X. But this was impossible, since the company had decided not to switch to Adobe Indesign but stick with Quark XPress. Using Quark 5 in a Classic environment, with all of it's font- and colormanagement, would be terribly difficult.
Since there is still no carbonized or cocoa-version of Quark, the majority of companies is waiting with their migration. And since there aren't a lot of companies (*cough!*Customers that pay for their software *cough!*) using OS X and software, spending much time and money on OS X and AltiVec optimization is not highly important for commercial developers.
If OS X had a larger marketshare, I think the software would be much better optimized and the differences would be much smaller. For instance, see what Apple did with the Safari-browser !
(I don't say that a Mac with OS X would be faster than a PC though, since that is pure speculative and can't be tested !)
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Given the actual marketshare of Apple, the current rise in high-profile Mac bashing (see Bill Gates CES keynote) make me think. What is this? Mere mockery? But why, if the Mac is defeated as so many claim. Or is it fear?
Whatever, Windows is not for me.
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
Apple does have Colorsync built in, which enables matching of scanner, monitor, and printer. Now, you *can* get software for the PC that does the same thing -- and it works well. However, the entire graphics and publishing industry is built around the Mac, Mac software, Mac color profiles, and Mac people who do things the Mac way. So unless your business is completely self contained, it doesn't make sense to use anything else. (If it is, fine, do what you want.)
you should really hang around on OSNEWS. Every once and a while a comparison of different compilors does come around. Try this post as an example http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2376
It's a decent example of pentium 4 benchmarking using the Intel and Gcc compilers.
...beats the hell out of pointing and clicking around GUI apps for repetitive tasks like the file conversions used in this test. Try doing that on a PC...
When i bought my powerbook with osx it was too soon, things didnt really roll until the 10.0.4 release. I was sucked in by their excellent marketing of the powerbook g4 running a gorgeous open sourceOS. Call me a sucker but apples marketing department sure knows what its doing! Still I felt resentment over buying (into) something that didn't live up to what I thought I would get.
But right now things are different. OSX is sweet, my powerbook g4 at 400mhz might not sound like a powerhouse but it's sexy. No matter what I run on it or do with it it conveys an image that I am stylish, that I value quality over other considerations such as cost and speed. That I think different. Even though I am a programmer I really noticed that this laptop made me stand out. If you're meeting creative people commercially the powerbook does the selling for you, it tells them you are no lummox. In many many fields the thing the apple brand means and conveys about its owner is a priceless add on.
I have to say i mostly run mandrake 9.0 cooker on the powerbook G4. With KDE 3.1 beta. People who have never seen osx but heard about it sometimes think Im running OSX and they comment on how beautiful it is. Yeah KDE 3.1 is gorgeous! It runs very well on the 400mhz G4. But all that's besides the point. (albeit it does show that its hardware rather than software that appeals!)
Apple did something with its brand that very very few companies have done. They created incredible value; Apple appeals to people. You dont get that with your dell or toshiba or even an alienware rig.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
I'm faster with Photoshop on my PC than anybody else is with Photoshop on Mac because I'm better at using Photoshop than they are. So nerr.
Just returned from a 2 month photo trip round Saudi.. and which laptop did I bring with me? An OS X iBook... I've learnt from past mistakes - Used a Dell XP laptop on a trip to Syria few months back.. XP packed up after 2weeks!! What complete waste of time had to use an old 98SE laptop which was kindly loaned to me.
this may sound like a troll, but i'm always suprised at how few people on /. like linux.
i use redhat on my pc, and os x on an ibook. i'm generally pretty excited about the commonality between platforms, even if it is mostly "under the hood". macs are a *nix operating system; they use unix utilites and have much in common with my redhat box. i'm very happy if i can write an app or shell script and have it run on both machines with little hastle. apple currently does a very good job (compared to other vendors) in supporting open standards. even though there are licensing issues, there is enough in common, that using a mac i feel like my programming effort isn't wasted.
as a user example, i use CUPS to print to a printer that isn't technically supported.
i also notice that most of the really techie stuff doesn't show up much in these discussions. the mac windowserver is the thing i most miss under redhat/x11. i'm not sure how it compares to the current MS windowserver. my experience using Adobe applications under Widows2000 is that it does a poor job in rendering text. i'm not technically adept enough to say exactly why, but applications such as InDesign actally do look a little better when scaling stuff on the mac. quartz extreme can (in some cases) partially offset the cpu slowness.
i realize it's hard to benchmark something like "it renders the text more accurately", and i'm also suprised that people don't take that into account.
the speed thing really isn't that important; it can be, and will probably be fixed. having open standards and a cool graphics api is what rocks!!
Assuming the stupidity and ignorance of people you don't like. Classic! That's the kind of attitude that loses wars.
Sure, Macs are lagging in raw CPU power, however Macs often suffer less problems. Windows PCs have improved a lot in this area since Windows 2000 and XP however.
What you gain in one area you can often lose in another area.
Having changed over (finally) from Mac OS 9.2.2. to OS X 10.2.3 on January 1, 2003, my memory of how Photoshop worked on MacOS 9 is fresh, and it is slower on OS X.
With OS X I'm often, very often, waiting for the machine on Photoshop operations that I never have in the past.
OS X is in it's infancy, still in some ways a beta test product.
A fast PC will beat current Macs in many things, at least until the PC gets its knickers in a knot and needs to be rebooted.
Apple does indeed need faster processors, and a lot of the kinks still need to be worked out of OS X and applications that work with it.
Does the fact a PC can do some things faster than my Macs bother me? Yup! Does that mean I'll be changing to a PC anytime soon? Nope!
I'm comfortable with my Macs and with my *nix server.
Tomas
you raise an interesting point, but what's the lower limit of perception for (most?) users? i'd be suprise if anyone noticed a time delta of more than a tenth of a second, and 100msec is a long time in system terms (couple of moniter vsyncs, $bignum cpu cycles, etc. forgive me the math, it's almost 4am and i'm dead tired) of course the question of how much of the time delta perception is "real" and how much is derived from a placebo-like effect is one that'll throw you for a loop, so let's ignore it. ;-) ["Here's your Shiny New Computer(tm)!" "Wow, it sure feels faster, just looking at it!"]
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Well, and of course there are other things like loading programs and stuff that gets speed up a lot.
One intresting thing: I gut a duron 1.2ghz to replace my 600. That's twice as fast. When I installed it I was amazed at the speed. Then I burnt it out, when I moved back to the 600, I didn't notice anything at all.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
From talking to the Photoshop folks, I get that Photoshop is basically equally optimized for both platforms, and they take fine-tuning their platform optimizations very seriously. It was one of the first apps taking advantage of the Altivec engine, and Adobe was releasing interim optimization plug-ins every time Intel made improvemments to their MMX technology.
There are actually very few things in this world that are sexier than the Toshiba Portege 2010
Half an inch thick
2.6 lbs
2 inch 40GB hard drive
and double your MHz
They compared the very fastest notebook you can buy (when not running off battery), which only runs nearly that fast when tethered to wall outlet with cpu cooking at like 50W, to a PowerBook that is slower than any you can buy right now (20% lower clock rate and much less cache than currently available) and uses less than half the power.
What kind of comparison is that???
Looking at the charts, it appears that a current PowerBook would easily smoke the P4 book in speed alone. Even if you ignored the higher cache (which is not insignificant b/c altivec is severely handicapped by small caches), a 1GHz PowerBook would be about 25% faster than the one they tested. This would make it faster than any P4 book even when P4 plugged into wall cooking at like 50W.
Furthermore, PowerBooks with Radeon cards can run at full speed for hours on one battery, whereas P4 books will roast your nads for about an hour while running half speed and then die.
I've never owned an Apple product and certainly am not a mac zealot, but this test is ridiculously rigged. Nice way to get on Slashdot real easy.
y?
I tried to do some programming on the Mac by using the provided (free) documentation about a month after the iMac came out (this was during school and we had a Mac rep). Unfortunatly, their documentation sucked. I couldn't find info on writing a C++ program to display "hello world"! All they had was some tutorial on using their beutiful interface builder and Nextstep API/Objective-C stuff. Great. Note that the Mac Rep was a CS student and even he couldn't get "hello world" to work... Finally in June 2002 (5 month after launch!), they finally came out with a simple tutorial telling people how to do that. No wonder there's a lack of programs for the Mac... The doc may be better now, but it still doesn't compare to MSDN Library.
Lets see, since December 2001 (2 years)
PC iMac
---- ------
3 0 Complete rebuilds due to OS taking a shit.
6 hrs N/A[1] Average time between crashes
No Yes Mom could use it?
100+ 3 Questions during OS install.
$2,499[2] 0 Dev tools cost per user.
[1] My iMac has NEVER crashed
[2] Direct MS price as of Jan 13, 2002
I would but another Mac in a nanosecond - coincidently the same amount of time that passes between thoughts of using an axe on my PC.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Myself and a bunch of other N*X geeks at the local user group have bought iBooks in the last year and a half. There are reasons other than speed to buy mac over intel.
Fire in the MacOS shell!
...every time the Mac vs. PC debate rolls around - I use (and support) both kinds of machine extensively in my job, and can conclusively say that by far the worst thing about either platform is the users.
uh, why do you mention quark?
it's photography, not dp.
also, as far as i know apple doesn't make quark xpress, quark does.
Man and Goat
You may get a bit of a wow factor when you carry around a flat laptop like that - or a laptop with a detachable screen and winxp tablet edition.
... carrying around a mac powerbook g4 laptop .. maybe its something you need to experience. I can tell you it's weird to have what is just a productivity tool impart such a message to the people that see you use it. I've been a PC person since I got an IBM PC running at 4.77 mhz, built my own rigs and bought average laptops from nondescript brands.. Nothing to prepare me for the experience of having my laptop computer be a hot fashion article. Its very interesting.
But
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Who still cares about speed with 1GHz+ processors ? 400MHz is fast enough for me, only people dealing with synthetic images need the fastest... I mean what difference does it if your filter applies in 6 seconds instead of 3 ?
blah
Half an inch thick
.6/.75, which I assume means .6 at the thin end and .75 at the other end. Still pretty sweet but "half an inch thick" is misleading.
:)
.5 inches deeper, and 1.5 inches wider (to accomodate the 15.2 inch widescreen.) Plus you get built in firewire and gigabit ethernet, and a real video card (64 meg Radeon mobility vs. 16MB Trident CyberALLADIN-T). The only real advantage the Toshiba has is the weight - 2.6 pounds is incredible, but you pretty much have to choose weight or battery, and I'll take battery life any day of the week.
Actually, according to Toshiba's site, it's
2.6 lbs
Also a pretty sweet number, but no optical drive and half the battery life of a powerbook. Put a real battery and a dvd drive in there and see how light it is.
and double your MHz
BZZZT! Take a look at Apple's web page. All the powerbooks come with either 867Mhz or 1.0Ghz G4s. And since they don't have the power consumption of a P3, you actually get to use them at that speed when on the road.
Anyway, that is a pretty sexy notebook, but I don't think it compares. For $300 more than the toshiba, you can have a powerbook that has a larger, higher resolution screen, twice the battery life, and a dvd-rom/cd burner. Not only that, but it is just a quarter inch thicker,
Strictly hardware-wise, I'd say the powerbook stomps all over the toshiba, and that doesn't even get me started on how much cooler OS X is than XP, but that's much more a matter of opinion.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
Once again I'm amazed how slashdotters bother to bicker about PCs and Macs or OSs or whatever. No true geek could be satisfied with only one architecture or operating system.
I'm running Windows and Linux on an x86 hardware just fine, but how could I be happy with only those.
I want more computers so I can add a *BSD or two. And I must get some new purdy Macs to drool over. Or maybe an old Sun to run as server. Wonder if I could salvage an old minimachine from some companys trashbin? Maybe I'll just kill a friend and take his SGI Indy.
Oh, forget it, I'll just wet my pants with dreams of EV78.
I WANTS MORE!!1
Begging for modpoints since '03
No reason to think I am running XP on this...
I have a totally stacked laptop that is pretty much double everything the powerbooks are which I use as a desktop, more or less. The Toshiba is for browsing and email and portability. With internal Wi-Fi it is great for GAIMing with friends whilst on the toilet or carrying under an arm on the way to the library. I am fortunate enough to have enough resources to have more than one laptop and I (*me* personally) am far happier with these two laptops running Debian and serving opposite functions than I would be using Mac hardware or software which is mostly bloated and just not configurable enough for my tastes.
I owned a Libretto L2 and the battery life is about 2 hrs max. Using any power saving mode will make quite un-usable.
Now benchmark things like environmental (annoying) noise, CPU (and cooling system) electrical power needs, CPU temperature, TFT quality, battery life, hardware and software usability (which really rises productivity), size, weight, clever case design, or (simply) sex-appeal :-P
Raw power is not the only important parameter. That Pentium4 notebook is just a piece of crap for my needs, I would buy any PowerBook G4 but not that HUGE "notebook" wanna-be (they give you four wheels and a dog strap for carrying purposes when you buy it, don't they?).
Arguments about workstations are similar, but the notebook case is pretty clear for me.
Try Ubuntu GNU/Linux, it's great!!!
I am not surprised there is no OSX version of Quark. Since when has Quark ever given a toss about its users? It is the worst kind of monopoly. I am a long-term Quark user, and I can't wait to switch to Indesign, because I will finally not have to kowtow to Quark's attitude.
I know lots of designers like this. Adobe are being very clever in that they are actively wooing Quark users. Quark is closer to extinction that anyone realises because so many of its user base actively wants to switch, and is even prepare to relearn skills just to do so!
I didn't bother mentioning Linux since it's available for both. :)
:) The processor does have double the Mhz, and without getting into the whole Mhz argument (I'm definitely not claiming the powerbook is faster) I've never had a speed issue with my powerbook, and it's only the 667 - I hear the Ghz powerbooks rock. However, one of my co-workers has one of those Sony's, and it is a *beast*! 8.4 pounds with the optical drive in, (vs 5.4 for the powerbook) almost twice as thick as the powerbooks, an inch wider and 2 inches deeper. I guess it is double the volume. :) The screen is only slightly bigger than the powerbooks, unless of course you check out the new 17" powerbooks, but that ain't cheap. ;) The video card is also much nicer on the powerbooks - 64 meg radeon 9000 vs 32 meg radeon 7500. Anyway, they both have their advantages - the sony is faster and has a bigger screen, but the powerbook has better video and is WAY more portable. And personally, I think the powerbooks look about a trillion times better than the sonys.
:)
I can certainly understand having two different notebooks for different purposes, but I don't know if I can let you get away with saying the sony is "pretty much double everything the powerbooks are".
Anecdotal evidence: like I mentioned, my co-worker has one of those sonys, and it seems like a pretty nice machine, but he drools over my powerbook.
Anyway, different strokes for different folks. The powerbooks aren't for everyone, especially if you aren't a mac guy.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
...the buggiest, least stable pile of crap it has ever been my displeasure to use. People gave WinME a bashing but it had nothing on that. My OS9 Mac running IE6 must crash once an hour. And I don't use any fancy control panels/extensions either. I loathe it with a vengeance.
Guess what - my WinXP PC hardly ever crashes.
No seriously,
My PC's too fast, I can't get as many things done in a day as my PC can manage, you know I need to think a little between tasks and a fast pc just leaves me....ummmm.... not waiting and bored.
Please give me a slower computer so that I can be less bored and more productive...
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
it's funny, because you've seen the same effect in two places and used it as an 'advantage' where it suited you and a 'disadvantage' where it didn't.
g4 / p3:
the g4 makes more efficient use of each clockcycle, but isn't capable of reaching anywhere near the clock cycle limit of the p3. they end up with a similar maximum performance
p3 / p4:
the p3 makes (slightly) more efficient use of each clockcycle, but cannot reach anywhere near the number of clockcycles. end result, the p4 is more powerful.
athlon xp / p4:
the athlon xp gets more done per clockcycle, but cannot reach the number of cycles the p4 can. end result, they are pretty much neck and neck, taking turns at leading in performance.
ironically, in their obsession with clock cycles, mac fans have fallen into the same trap they always accused pc fans of falling for. it's like a sort of inverse 'megahertz myth', where they see the efficiency with which the processor uses each clock cycle as the be all and end all of processing power, which is just as obviously false as seeing the number of clock cycles as being the be all and end all of processing power.
the only real way to measure these things is with real world benchmarks, and a lot of them combined rather than a few hand picked to help the favoured system. (hint: amd / intel come out pretty close, macs are falling further and further behind, dual processor doesn't count, because you can do that with pcs too if you want)
nice operating system, shame about the hardware fascism.
my post (parent) is a bit wrong, my apologies to humina. i misread your post, please ignore my first para :)
now come over to some outdated apple hardware, that is more than 6 months old and already updated by apple.
Now we'll run a bunch of tests which aren't really graphic design, but more just heavy processor benchmarking. Mix this with totally ignoring real world creation speeds in sight for things like continual rapid disc access.
Then look at what you are really getting, it's no suprise than a single 3.06GHz chip is out performing 2x1.25GHz(and despite multithreading, 2x1.25 isn't 2.5GHz, and will perform much slower than that). Now I look at the differences in times. Despite picking tasks which are more cpu dependant, the apple still performs comparably despite being a lower clocked cpu, and running on an OS that will not allow photoshop to use 100% cpu when other background tasks are in use.
Your graphic designer will argue that the mac is faster in real world design creation. Or alternatively if you are willing to take serious contrived tests, try the apple photoshop test script, which will leave a 1GHz powerbook outperforming the fastest pentium 4M (2.25GHz) by up to 40% in some tests.
I needn't bring in other real world graphic design issues such as windows inability to colour sync or high speed access to firewire and other important graphic design orientated technologies. Or perhaps the fact that the powerbook in question is already a 2 year old design, and even back then it still had a digital screen.
So I apologise to the boffins that think throwing me a bunch of contrived numbers will disprove my real world experiences.
I would like to note to all the Mac users who claim that PCs crash too much, my Windows XP notebook was running for a solid month without a reboot. The only reason it gets shut down is to install software that needs a reboot.
SIGFAULT
New Powerbooks like the one I have on order have a 64Mb Radeon 9000 in them. The reason I have one on order is because my old 500MHz Powerbook is showing its age a bit (I dropped it and now the DVD-ROM and one screen hinge is broken). Other than that, it would still be a fine machine. It's easily fast enough for my purposes (office type work, development type work), so I'm looking forward to the new one.
:)
Even though it's two years old, people still comment on what a fab laptop it is. Looks count I guess
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I don't follow bench marks or processor speeds. I have 2 Macs in my home and use a Mac at work. I use them because they are EASY and don't require much maintenance. OS X is very stable and all of my apps run on it without much (or any) problem. I have tried about every version of Windows since 3.1 and I can't say the same for the Microsoft product.
Benchmark all you want...it just doen't matter to me.
This is a horrid way of justifying PC vs Mac... Macs don't benefit from speed, that's obvious... the 'mhz myth' campaign by apple is just a marketing ploy.
The real reason to use macs in digital editing is colour. The colour (yes, with a 'u') on macs is infinently closer to print than a PC is.
This is why apples are used in 99.9% of print shops, and PCs are used in more web design shops. If you aren't printing, then PCs are just fine. Soon as print comes into the question, you simply can't use PCs. You'll be printing, editing, printing editing, so often that it'll take a lot longer than waiting 2 extra seconds while exporting a file.
Anyone who works in printing will know what I mean if they ever tried putting a curve on a dcs file... PCS just can't get it right.
I've read the article but not the comments, though I can imagine a respectable number of mac zealots are still trying to justify their preference of the Mac platform with rational arguments.
Well, PCs are faster, d'uh. It's not like I'm ever gonna use one though. I don't need to "Be Right" in front of PC users, I don't need rational arguments to justify my completely irrational addiction to Apple computers. In my world buying a Wintel PC is equivalent to depriving yourself of a Mac; an absurdity. Let me live in this world, that's all I'm asking.
I manipulate very very large photoshop files (100 meg +). A dual g4 1gzh is plenty fast for this..
I usually am playing mp3s when working and its still fing.
And that OSX is realy stable. Plus the built in color matching in OSX is a blessing..Saves so much time when printing, I usually get what I expect out of the printer, which saves time ink and $.
I work for a GD department who handles the advertising for up to 6 different newspapers.
We run new G4's with the same as a server/raid setup.
It seems to be a common thread that design companies are scared witless to change with the times: We still run OS 9.x on all the machines, with Quark 4/Illus/Photoshop. We run day and night shifts and use the computers and the software's features extensively for about 18 hours every working day.
Everyone else in our building (and all the off-site ones) uses PC's.
Coupla things in my experience:
The Macs crash all-the-time. Far more than the other in-house design company running wintel 2000 boxes. Yes we get technicians out to fix and check we're not doing anything stupid.
Quark sucks arse (no layers! no multiple undo! crap menus!)
If you're in a hurry, the mac gui is messy and annoying due to different fullscreen/desktop actions. This is a problem even for the people who have been weened on Macs and nothing else.
Bad multitasking ads to this problem; both in a back end and front end way.
Sherlock is crap for finding files that you're not sure the name of.
You can't rename/save/delete from any dialog box, which slows people down.
Saving multiple files is a bastard without Default Folder.(a 3rd prty addon)
The newspaper printers use PC's requiring us to adjust images/formats anyway.
You get fast at anything on any machine if you sit in front of it long enough and learn the keyboard shortcuts and system structure.
Altivec IS a set of SIMD instructions for PowerPC. It processes data as 128 bit chunks either as integers or 32 bit floats (no doubles, which is a problem for some scientific applications).
Unfortunately, as happens with these things (even in Wintel, where it's worse as there's been MMX, SSE, SSE2 and probably some more) is that there's few tasks optimized for it. Those tasks where the macs were competitive were probably optimized for Altivec (Photoshop mostly). Even then the slow memory bus often means the processor crunches data far faster than it can be fed once the caches run out.
The IBM 970 is probably going to blow away Photoshop speed benchmarks, as it does Altivec AND has a proper bus speed.
How can I get ahold of this idiot? Even though the Mac is a dual g4, the conversion process for anyone of these images is a single threaded process which will only run on one cpu. OSX or MacOS 9.x. Those tests are 99% B.S.
For about 2.5 years I used a Nikon Coolpix 990 for all of our digital photography needs. Pretty much every picture required some time in Photoshop because of the poor placement of the flash in relation to the main lens, because of the Nikon's tendency to run red, and because of the useless red-eye reduction feature. I just replaced it with a Canon EOS D60, and of the 250 pictures I've taken since getting it, less than a dozen have required time in Photoshop. I'd toyed with a Canon Powershot G3, and it seemed like it'd require very little Photoshop time, too. So if you've got a good enough camera and know how to use it, your CPU's clock speed won't matter much at all. You'll be spending more time worrying about hard drive space and how to back up/archive everything.
It's not necessarily the speed - the UI makes a difference in workflow too. Some people feel Linux is faster because of the root access, others think this is mind numbing and non productive. The Mac has the best GUI BY FAR. In my opinion, it even inspires creativity. Look how ALL fashions instantly change to what is popular on the Mac. Brushed metal is the rage in home audio. Jaguar prints are the rage in fashion. Fruity see through was in vogue when the LifeSavers iMacs were produced. Switch style commercials are the current advertising trend.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I have prints I made thru my job *cough* that are 15' long on that baby. A panorama the size of a room with the view of what you really saw.
I also have some very incredible 20x30@400dpi printed on Colour Metallic paper.
God I loved that machine....
What's not elaborated on here is why many graphics pros choose the mac. It isn't for raw speed, but because they prefer the development environment the mac gives them over Windows. Even if something is faster on the latest cutting edge PC, if it is harder for the user to get what he needs done then it makes no difference. As a user of both OS X and Windows I can attest to this. The fastest PCs have been faster than their mac counterparts for a while now for some things. But I don't really care about that. OS X improves my workflow so much that it probably evens out in the end. To make a car analogy, do I have to buy a Ferrari just because its faster? I think I'll stick with my Rolls Royce.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Ignoring issues of comparing Apples to oranges... I expect the multi-processor PowerMac was chosen because there aren't any single-proc that go much over 1GHz, while the P4 is at 3GHz. I also understand the author was using current machines and so did not go with an older 1GHz P# (which would probably have included other older components). Can anyone with knowledge on Apple's multiprocessor tech and the software in question comment on whether said software would have effectively used both processors, if at all?
THIS JUST IN: Faster processor performs faster operations!!!!!!
More at 11.
Many photography magazines (and web sites) are slammed for wasting so much time on equipment, like lens tests. After all, a mediocre camera in the right hands still yields good results, and a good camera in the wrong hands is useless.
So when photographers start into computers, what do the computer guys do? They write articles with a bunch of pseudo-scientific "tests" that are just as bad as anything PopPho does.
I'm kind of embarassed to be a computer scientist.
Look at all the comments that this article generated. If all of those were lines of code (or documentation) for Gimp or Linux, who knows, maybe we'd have real color calibration on Linux by now.
How about low price?
For the record, the Alienware laptop shown was about $500 more than I paid for my new Powerbook there, killer.
--- What
I wouldn't wanna have one in my basement.
My Macs are Macs running OS X & OS 9.2. My PC is a server box running slackware. It might as well be invisible.
I don't like the x86 architecture. I definitely don't like Windows. I like Aqua. End of story.
The hardware'll get faster next week and the week after and the week after that. But I bought it when I needed it and when I could afford it and when it did what I needed. And with the style I wanted to do my work in.
That's what its about.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I pay a little more (for a desktop), and sacrifice a little hardware choice, and in return I save hours a week in productivity. At my hourly rate, that's way more than the $200 more I paid for the machine and the pain and anguish of owning a PC.
But with all of that said, use what you're comfortable with. A PC doesn't make sense to me, but if your freakish mannerisms let you tolerate the PC world, by all means, go ahead and use one. :-)
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
The author of the comparison forgets little things like the ammounts of RAM, bus speed and the harddrive have a drastic impact on simple data crunching operations. He goes for what the typical computer ignorant consumer always goes for, processor speed. I agree with the above poster I would have like to seen the machines put through their paces with special effects applications and adjustments which can really bog down a machine. I also can't find any referance in his test to what his settings in Photoshop are. Important ones like scratch disk settings or maxium ram ussage. While I don't doubt the latests PC's could smoke a Mac in many of the applications, I would have like to seen it. Rather than some half-assed test that has too many disparities to be usefull or prove anything.
Also in response to the FPS of a digital camera. Why would you need more than 3 seconds of sustained photo shooting, what are shooting, a movie? Besides go look at the digital Nikons if you want some more FPS. Cannon has been dragging ass with their digital cameras, and needs to play catch-up. (Funny it used to be that film looked better than digital, now it's just digital is slower.)
The R&D of late on this chip have been aimed at highly specialized, mostly embedded, uses like set-top boxes for satellite and cable TV, networking equipment (Cisco and Nortel are big customers), and automotive systems.
Dont forget, IBM is the one that is running the PowerPC show now, not just Motorola.
Rob Galbraith is dumb and wrong to draw conclusions about platform superiority from benchmarks of the Canon File Viewer Utility. The slashdot comments here are equally irrelevant because none of you seem to be photographers that use this software (I see 0 comments discussing RAW image conversion out of 237).
;-)
Canon's RAW image convertor is a proprietary piece of software that turns the RAW data off the camera's CCD (or CMOS sensor in the case of the high end Canon SLRs) into TIFF or JPEG files.
Canon's RAW image conversion software is HORRIBLE on BOTH Mac and PC (measured by performance and UI). It has to be one of the most poorly written pieces of software I've ever used. Benchmarking a platform with this software is inane! It's like comparing two cars by screwing on concrete wheels.
Canon's software is obviously written by amateur programmers (or maybe even AN amateur programmer). It was poorly coded for the PC and, in turn, that bad code was then ported to the mac. Where Canon digital cameras are ingenious...the best of breed, their desktop software is clueless, worst of breed.
Further, the Canon File Viewer 1.1 code on the mac is not naitive, it's carbonized (and only just barely carbonized...it was released just a few months ago and has recieved no updates from its initial 1.1.1.22 version). The classic mode Canon RAW Image Convertor actually works better (from a UI and performance standpoint) on the Macintosh than the carbonized Canon File Viewer 1.1. (Im testing with a Powerbook G4 800).
Canon's horrible software has driven third parties to attempt to build better RAW image convertors. Alas, Canon has not released the algorithm for RAW image conversion to the public (nor licensed it commercially). This has left developers guessing how to decypher the RAW file format. No third party including Bibble (which Rob Galbraith uses as another benchmark...bonehead) has achieved any performance improvements over Canon's bad software because of its closed source nature.
The bottom line is that your OS selection should not be based on Rob Galbraiths data but on more refined aspects of each OS, like how productive you will be on each platform over a period of years.
-----------
PS. You slashdotters enjoy your flame war about mac vs PC. An OS is what you make of it. I'm sure all of you have settled on a favourite platform already... so why are you arguing which is better? And if you haven't decided on a platform...I'll save you some time, buy an Apple G4 running OS X.
The tester, in an attempt to compare apples to apples (so to speak), only used software with versions on both platforms. Having ported a good deal of software to the Mac, I know that companies tend to treat their Mac versions as second class citizens. Often the Mac versions have an internal emulation layer of one kind or another.
In any case, what the tester was trying to do figure out which system was fastest. What he should have done was look for the fastest graphics software on each platform. On the Mac, I'm pretty sure that won't be software from the camera manufacturer. What needs to be tested is the speed of the task, regardless of which software performs it.
Quoting:
"Troy Dreier, writing for PC Magazine's First Looks section in the February 4 issue, calls the dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4 "one fast machine."
In a benchmark in Adobe Photoshop, the magazine finds that cross-platform comparisons with a new 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 PC with Hyper-Threading, the G4 outpaces the PC in every test but one, the Gaussian Blur, in which the match was a draw.
He reports the G4 is faster at Sharpen Edges, Unsharp Mask, Despeckle, Convert to RGB, and Resize (presumably thanks to the Velocity Engine, and Photoshop's dual processing support and G4 optimization)."
Check it out at http://www.powerpage.org/story.lasso?newsID=10439
Yeah, But I wonder how many of those 1 and 2 second leads were overshadowed by having to reboot the XP box durring these tests? I doubt they had to reboot either of the Mac's even once.
It's been a long time since raw processing power was the dominant factor in my computing efficiency. Granted, as a Web designer/developer my graphics are smaller, and I am in text editors half the time, but most of the time my computer is still waiting for me to click.
Sure it would be nice to shave a few seconds off my file previewing, but it's the functionality of the applications that really speeds up my work. I am pretty objective about computing platforms, and before OS X came out, PCs and Macs seemed so close in functionality that the price/performance difference could not be ignored. However, with preemptive multi-tasking, unix shell, protected memory, out-of-the-box Apache and PHP, and of course BBEdit, it's impossible for me to imagine doing web development on any other platform right now.
I haven't used XP yet, but I certainly haven't heard anything very compelling about it. I know that PCs _can_ work great under the right circumstances, but ever since installing IE 6 and having my PCs hard drive get scrambled beyond recognition, the extra $1000 I pay for my Mac does not seem unreasonable. It's the price you pay for standardized hardware and a useable Unix GUI with big name apps. OS X lets me breathe a big sigh of relief.
Its about the OS, stupid.
A client of ours (Fortune 500) got in contact with Adobe because Illustrator 10 is so much slower than Illustrator 9. The Adobe rep admitted that the Mac versions of their programs are slow because they are written for Windows and ported to the Mac. They make sure the Windows version is fast, and the Mac version gets zero optimization.
I do that on a PC all the time. If you want to do it too, download ActiveState perl and ppm install Image::Magick. You can put Cygwin on there if you want (it's obviously useful to have grep, etc.).
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Mac/photographer's forum response.
The real difference in times for this test was on the batch processing tests. I, like most people, don't do tons of batch processing. So what? Over the course of a year, how much time do I spend waiting for my Mac to finish a Photoshop batch, and how much time do I spend installing anti-virus software and dealing with OS problems on my WinTel box. I'm still using my Mac to get more done.
The crippled DDR support of modern PowerMacs
Apparently, according to the StepMania Forums FAQ, work is in progress to port a DDR implementation to the Mac.
Does Apple sell a lot of Macs in Berlin and the surrounding areas (the former DDR)?
Will I retire or break 10K?
yes, we print in a cmyk world for the most part. that has not stopped adobe with pdf from proposing and implementing rgb workflows in prepress. although it takes years for new workflows to be implemented--why indesign is not making a dent in quark's ineptness--they are beginning to hit the high end. we work in web printing--mostly books. and this is where the new tech happens, due to the cost savings realized. cmyk is nothing great, it's just another method. as a designer, i don't even really look at color on screen, it's in my head. i'm sure many photographers work the same way. film (nor ccds) do not see what you see. as a professor used to tell us, "look through the camera, not at it!"
a crispy 100dpi screen, OSX
Does Mac OS X let you change the system-wide virtual screen resolution? Windows does (Display Properties > Settings > Advanced... > General > Font Size). Or is Mac OS X fixed at 1 point == 1 pixel (72 virtual dpi) like Mac OS 1 through 9?
Will I retire or break 10K?
But hold on, what's to stop you using a powerful shell on a PC/Linux or PC/Windows?
The fact that users of your scripts have to download the shell, which may be many megabytes. Downloading a 10 MB Cygwin environment on 56K dial-up at 9 cents per minute (e.g. Irish phone system) is not fun.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I may be a little bit late to mention this...but it seems that nobody else has... what is the memory architectures being compared here? 333Mhz DDR Ram is going to whip the llamas ass every time against 100Mhz Dimms...or 800 Mhz Rambus(read, rammed it in your ass if you bought this crap). I admit that I am unaware of the current state of mac evolution as it pertains to memory architecture....but I would imagine that it is not pressed very hard, since the processor speeds themselves are so much lower. You don't have a bottleneck with 100Mhz ram if your processor is plodding along at 800Mhz...it doesn't matter how efficient the cpu is, it doesn't need data at the rate that the 4Ghz cpus in use by intel do. Most of intels problem with the whole rambus screwup was because rambus had poor design when it came to this thing called 'wait states'. Also, the use of different rpm harddrives automatically make this test unuseful. Also, what are the transfer speeds? ata133? ata100? Is DMA an ongoing possibility with each of the machines? While I myself run photoshop on a win2k platform, and very happily with only 768Megs pc2300 DDR ram...I run a 7200rmp drive with ata100...and all that makes a big difference when I need to load stuff up and perform a transform or filter. I run a 1.3 Gig athlon. --even with this knowledge, I am pretty sure there are plenty of Macs out there that can whip my butt. But then I only spent $400 to build my machine...over a year and a half ago.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
The PC world dominates games
The PC world may dominate 1. first-person shooters, 2. real-time tactical simulations, and 3. massively multiplayer online games, but everywhere else, the Sony PlayStation 2 console and Game Boy Advance handheld system dominate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The difference is more like that between your basic Ford Focus ...versus the stately Mercedes - sure it can't do 0-60
More like a Yugo. The Mac is slower, is actually harder to use due to a lack of software and primitive hardware.
The people who whine about Macs costing too much and going too slow just don't understand the difference between luxury (Mac) and utility (PC). Feel free to stick with your Ford, and I'll stick with my Merc.
We don't whine. 90% of us just buy the better machines and laugh at thoe Mac users who paid more for less.
Sure, it is like a Mercedes.... if the Mercedes can go on only a few of the roads the Focus goes on, and the Mercedes is a lot slower than the Focus, and the Mercedes lacks air conditioner, door locks, and other features standard on the Focus. All while costing 3 times as much.
This is not news. Macs on average are slower than Wintel on average for processor dependant tasks. However in my experience in places where the CPU is not the bottle-neck, but how much time it takes to tell the machine to do something (through the interface), I have come to find my G4 faster.
Furtermore, for that matter using all M$ tech, IIS is faster than Apache. Still I don't use IIS, even though I have access to it, I use Apache. I can get a different car than my Saturn that is faster for a small amount more money as well, however I'll probably buy another Saturn.
Basically I only use what I trust for things that matter. I don't trust Microsoft for anything important, nor do I trust Ford to sell me a car with non-exploding tires. There is an old Russian saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. When someone takes you for a ride, you can continue taking it, or get off.
So after using Windows from version 2 to ME/2000, I have gotten off of the stupid ride. (Windows is reserved for educational purposes, to keep current on network administration, and as a toy) I like commercial software, like Photoshop, M$ Office (last major M$ app I use), and much of what the shrink-wrapped world has to offer. I don't have to deny myself these things with MOSX. Nor do I have give root to some company that I don't trust. The box is MINE, the os is MINE (xml is cool), I AM ROOT. This is non-negotiable. This is why I run FreeBSD, Slackware, MacOS X, YellowDog, NetBSD, et al.
I also like a nice interface. Although at first I didn't like the idea of a GUI when they first hit the scene, I have come to have finer tastes in my interfaces. I generally run Enlightenment (becauase I like it). Aqua or one of the toned down third party themes is also a decent UI with notable exceptions. Personally I find XP's "Fischer Price" look annoying and generally set it back to a 95/98/ME/2000 mode.
For that matter I also prefer Unreal Tournament to Quake III, alot. I actually don't really like Quake III much at all. Hence I paid for a copy of one and not the other.
Do I wish that PPC processors are faster? Yes, but then again I want the same for x86. Since I have both x86 and PPC machines it would be kinda lame to get into a pissing match with myself about which is faster... So while my x86 boxen are faster running photshop in Windows, I use my Mac for everything not entertainment.
Note: My last project was a 4200x4400 aerial photograph copiled from 462 mini-pictures pulled off of the M$ Terraserver. The Photoshop file was 110 megs and on my G4 733/640M RAM, there was only noticable lag once I had 420 or 440 layers.
I have one of the Dual 1.25 GHZ G4's and from my experiences with it, even in dual processor capable apps, it seems as if most of the heavy lifting falls on one processor most of the time. So I would guess that the scores the G4 got were mostly on one processor with the other picking up the occasional few threads of execution and handling other system tasks.
.vobs down to hard disk minus CSS and macrovision) and have them both going at full speed at once.
One of the advantages though is that while one CPU is maxed out dealing with photoshop (with a bit of help from its brother from time to time), you can use the remaining horsepower in the other CPU to do other things without really impacting your photoshop job very much.
Also for tasks where it almost always uses only one CPU, you can sometimes get two going at once and have both finish at the same time. I do that a lot when ripping DVD's to divx. I can get two movies going at once (after stripping the
Apple is working on better CPU's from all the rumors and such going around and if they keep with the dual processor game, the Mac will be set to overtake PC's in short order. In a way, I still prefer the dual G4 to the 3.06 GHZ P4 because I can fire off my P-shop job or whatever and play a game on the remaining power on the second CPU or work in another application without really impacting the big job on the main CPU.
That is where the Dual G4 really shines.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Adobe apparently chose to duck over it's err... "underground consumer base" by distributing betas of Illustrator 10 with nasty viral tendencies such as to destroy application linkage on Classic Adobe apps with said "serial numbers".........
* Multi-step resample: The time it took to resample up a D100 photo, in seven 110% increments, for printing on a 13 x 19 inch inkjet printer at 300 ppi, was tested.
* Unsharp Mask: The time it took to apply Unsharp Mask (Amount: 300% Radius: 1.5 Threshold: 1) then Fade the filter (Mode: Luminosity, Opacity: 100%), was tested. The photo's resolution was 20 x 30 inches at 300 ppi.
* Batch process using web site Action: The time it took to batch process 25 D100 JPEGs, saving them out as quality level 70 JPEGs using Save for Web, was tested. The processing steps were derived from an Action used in preparing photos for this web site: assign a profile, rotate, filter noise with Quantum Mechanic Pro, apply Unsharp Mask, Fade Unsharp Mask, resize to 450 pixels wide in three steps, apply Unsharp Mask, Fade Unsharp Mask, convert to sRGB, Export using Save for Web.
I have no idea what "web action" is nor would I be able to figure out what you mean by "set up." I processed over 1 gig of picutres and movies for christmas but I have no way to compare what I did to the benchmarks I read. I used two Athlons, a 1.3GHz machine and a 650MHz machine with SCSI. Both had on the order of 500MB or RAM. There is no set up time because I use Debian and never have to turn the machines off. Most conversions were done through ImageMagick, with a little GIMP work here and there. HTML generation was done with a slightly modified igal and a simple shell script to feed it directory trees. All said, most of the work was automated and did not take much of my time. The most time consuming task was burning 20 CDs one at a time. I'd love to be able to compare some of the conversions head to head - like a simple image resample defined in pixels. Something tells me that my little machine would do very well against something encumbered by M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
MMM....SEXY!!! Is that a floppy drive there in the first photo? I'm getting really excited!
There is a a discussion of this over at Digital Photography Review.
Here is another Mac vs. PC test entitled Mac Slaughtered Again, which includes this quote: "Of course, Mac stalwarts will cling to the notion that Mac OS X is so much better and easier to use than Windows XP, but if you're spending all day inside After Effects, which operating system you're using makes little difference. What does make a huge difference is if you have to sit and wait for rendering any longer than necessary.
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist
In short, take a power4, lop off core #2, reduce the amount of L2 cache, add an altivec execution unit, change the bus interface and make it on a smaller (.13 rather than .18) process, and eh voila, PowerPC 970
And will I need a soldering iron or do you think I'll manage with some tape, a conductive ink pen and a sharp knife...?
RMN
~~~
4) Profit!!
Really. I'd be thrilled to hear that Graphic Designers were buying PCs... go for it. Buy two - PCs are cheaper y'know.
What if you need to import Koala images from a c64 or NoL pics from a Nokia phone? Or even images from the TRS-80?
If you actually knew what you were talking about, you would know that the only difference between the two is that PCs default to 2.2 gamma while Macs default to 1.8 (which is also the default in most printer drivers). Apart from that, Photoshop uses exactly the same colour management routines in PCs and Macs (ACM, created by Adobe, that has nothing to do with Apple or Microsoft). Tell the Pc to use 1.8 (or the Mac to use 2.2) et voilá, both look exactly the same.
For the record, I've worked in two printing companies, and one of them used PCs exclusively (the other used about 40% PCs and 60% Macs).
Author: Hey, nice pictures! You must have a very good camera.
Photographer: Hey, nice book! You must have a real good typewriter.
don't know if it's true, but it certainly is accurate regarding "pirating". i've long said that piracy was m$'s key to success. office was for so long "free". even if businesses paid for it. m$ was assured of a user base, that essentially got free training, thus making anything obsolete. (the bastards, they knwew it all along)
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
you didn't say what type of "hello world" app. you were trying to make. of course, on os x you can simply use ansi c and compile with gcc in the usual manner for a command line program.
the main graphics apis are written in objective-c which is a short extention to the c language. if you are adept at obect-oriented programming, via java or c++, objective-c shouldn't take more than a day or so to grok. the objective c apis are also accessible from java in a couple different ways.
pure java can also be used; it is one of several ways to write cross-platform software for mac os x. another is realbasic, a 3rd party tool which uses visual basic syntax and can build some limited windows executables.
if you really love c++ for some reason, there is also the Qt library from trolltech. at the trolltech booth at macworld i saw a demo of their ide, which uses the same Qt widgets to build linux, mac and windows apps. (compiled for each platform of course)
and yes, interface builder is the default (free as in beer) way to build cocoa/api interfaces. for many (most?) purposes, it is the best way build applications quickly. it creates binary archives of obj-c objects, which isn't nearly as mysterious as it sounds.
Too bad tommorrow will never come for the mac.
Churchill quote from a parliment session.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Your homosexuality can be cured.
MacFag
I have a recently purchased 700Mhz eMac with 640mb of memory and a 1.5 year old Dell 8100 P4 1.3 with 256mb of RDRAM. The eMac is running OSX 10.2.3 and the Dell is running Win2K Pro or RedHat 8.0.
I have Bryce 3 that runs on either Mac or Win2K.
Before you scream 'no fair' for comparing a P4 1.3 to a 700mHz G4, keep in mind I just bought the Mac for $1K. I could have had a P4 2.4Mhz for the same money.
The P4 1.3 renders much faster than the G4 700.
However, the family fights over the Mac. The PC goes to the loser unless Linux is booted up, in which case it is a tie.
At this point, anything you can get new is fast enough for 99% of what most people do. I see the game shifting to useability and software functionality/cost factors. Don't discount the software value of the Mac. It is true that most SW for Mac is more expensive than Windows, but the SW bundled free with the Mac is very good, and there is also some good OSS and Apple supplied free stuff for download.
And no @!#$% Windows registry to deal with!
My Powerbook G4 400MHz was not shut down or restarted at all for 4 months last year without a hitch. Everything worked fine -- and if you don't include restarts for software installs (though most software on a Mac doesn't need a restart), I have only shut my computer down about 10 times since I bought it 2 years ago, and half of those were boots in OS9. OSX is unbelievably stable and has worked almost flawlessly for me for the entire time.
I don't know if this was mentioned higher up, but I recently openned a Tivo, and saw that it used a PPC chip as well.
-Alex
I wonder what the results would've been if they'd managed to get their hands on the (much rumored) version of OS X that runs on Intel processors...
Project Builder ->File -> New Project -> C++ tool Complle (hammer symbol) run (terminal icon) Hello, World !
On a Mac, you can scan, capture prints, print to multiple printers, view your work on multiple displays, work on images in multiple applications, and still maintain perfect color calibration all along, because the computer itself has had color calibration built in for years and years. The hardware, OS, and application platform knows that the user wants to really see what is in his or her work. On the PC, this STILL is not so. What is the point of rendering your work a little faster if it is compromized by artifacts such as every color being wrong?
> If RAW photo and Photoshop batch processing are
> important in your workflow, then speed is what
> you need
Batch processing is the LEAST important Photoshop benchmark BY FAR. Here's why: as a Photoshop user, you sit in front of your work; examine it; decide to make a change to it, then you use a tool or command to make that change, then you WAIT while the computer does that change and displays the results for you. You have to wait because you don't necessarily know the next step you're going to take until you see the results of the last. That wait is the wait that we want to get rid of as Photoshop users. This is why the PowerPC has a bunch of special features for rotating and sizing graphics very quickly, because those are hugely CPU intensive and you do them all day long in any kind of creative workflow, still or video graphics especially. For batch processing, I turn it on and it runs in the background all day while I don't notice, or I run the batch on an older machine that is dedicated to that, or run the batch overnight. That is not what wastes ARTIST TIME, which is the most expensive part of a graphics workflow.
This article is crap. It is like a Tom's Hardware Guide To Digital Photography that talks all about seconds and MHz and nothing about color, style, art, workflow, creativity, and professional OUTPUT.
Kids: do not buy Microsoft game consoles and try to do real work on them. You will be frustrated unless you are using MS Office or just text-editing. That is all PC's are good for unless you are a part-time CS guy or have a geek around that you can abuse whenever Windows needs its dick sucked a little bit.
This kind of article makes Bill Gates get a chubby. "See? Our 9 pound notebook with a 70 watt CPU that constantly throttles back and 1.5 hour battery life and DOS2000 OS can pull data off a CF card slightly faster than a one-inch thick Mac with a 14 watt RISC CPU, UNIX, Mac, and 5 hour battery life. And the PC is $200 cheaper and comes with almost no decent software and almost no guarantees. What a value. Look, I put a picture on the screen! Wow!"
Come out of the 20th century, Slashdot geeks. Apple just launched a $3000 notebook that's 1" thick, has a 17" TFT screen, built-in Bluetooth, built-in 802.11g (note the g), built-in FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, DVI-VGA-S-Video out, 24-bit audio in and out, Mac OS X (now with X11 and KHTML-rendering Web browser), iLife (nothing on the PC is nearly as good as this, you have to see to understand), slot-load SuperDrive (DVD-RW, CD-RW), 5-hour battery (that's with the CPU running full-speed) and weighs 6 pounds. I don't know how anyone can seriously compare the Mac and PC platforms anymore. It's the 21st century: we don't carry big beige boxes or gasoline generators (to run Dell notebooks) in the field.
This article is like looking at the world of digital photography through a pinhole. Look at the bigger picture. There are a billion little reasons, like JPEG2000 only being supported on Mac OS X so far, like the way your photograph looks REAL on Mac OS X and an Apple display. The contrast and color balance just can't be done on a PC. There isn't one made that can do it and there never has been. They're not building for those customers over at Wintel, whereas Apple is. Bill Gates shows you a goo-gaw so you think the PC is the uber-PC, but then the features don't show up or don't work when they do. DirectX is no CoreAudio, for example. The same is true at every level of the two systems. You suffer so much in so many ways on a PC ? to say that it's OK because you can read your CF card a little faster is just so amazing. The built-in assumption is that you already have a PC and are willing to I.T. it. Why? Why? Why? What Apple ships just in software with a new machine is worth the system price. The hardware is basically free.
PCs have had it (gigacolor) since the summer, shipping in a $350 add on card.
Where is this on the macintosh, ruler of all that is print and color photography?
Anyone notice that there was no Photoshop bakeoff this time around with the new machines? Granted, the new laptops aren't that much faster (faster memory and bus speed in the 17 inch notebook, but otherwise the same), but it's telling just the same.
Apple is very unhappy with the lack of processor upgrades from Motorola, which is why they are turning to IBM for the PPC970. IBM, unlike Motorola, (a) actually knows how to do research in processor design, (b) can actually build a good processor and has the chip fabs to back it up, and (c) can actually back up their promised delivery date, if not beat it.
And now... my Dennis Miller impersonation.
The first person who mentions OSX for X86 can answer one question: Where will the applications come from?
My guess as to events when/if this occurs:
10:00 AM - Apple announces OSX for X86.
10:00:00.01 AM - MS pushes new EULA to all of the MSDN outlawing the development of any code that could possibly run on anything other than MS Windows. (Don't believe me? Look at the EULA now for just looking at any of their source code, which disallows use of any code tied to "Open Source" (read Linux, GNU, etc.)).
10:00:00.011 AM: MS cancels development and support of MS Office, MSN Messenger, Outlook Express (sorry, that's been done), Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player for the MacOS and OSX.
10:00:00.0111 AM: Using hidden code in above mentioned products, MS deactivates all copies of these products.
10:00:00.02 AM: OSX based systems will mysteriously no longer be able to connect to Windows systems. (So much for SMB/CIFS shares)
10:00:01 AM: Adobe and Macromedia announce that they will no longer support Mac OSX due to the high cost of converting their code to the new OS. (For the most part, their MacOS ports are Carbon, not Cocoa, so a simple recompile won't do the trick.) Other developers follow suit.
This leaves us with Cocoa applications and ported Linux applications. Granted there are still a lot of good apps in this arena, but most of your corporate and home buyers will never see them.
This is, of course, my opinion, I could be wrong.
We're sorry, the phone number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try your call again
Several of my friends have downloaded big stuff for me.
In fact my old CTX machine ran for over five years under windows 95 without me ever needing to re-install the operating system.
Where are the Photoshop only tests? Te guy 1th show unoptimed progs that run slower on the mac and then uses them to slow photoshop down..
I know this is too late to get any reads, but if you look at the software used in the benchmark, I'll bet none of it is optimized to run on a mac, much less take advantage of Altavec. If you look at the one set of tests in photoshop, the mac desktop is very competative with the 3ghz pc. I am not arguing that Macs are faster computers, but I am saying this benchmark is useless
Yawn.
Well, It seems to me that people think that Apple's low Mhz processor systems should be faster than PC compatibles with single faster Mhz processor.
:)
The article says so implicitly.
Wrong!
If Intel processor has enough fast Mhz for compensating the inefficient architectur, then it can be faster than PowerPC. And nowadays the Intel processors are that fast.
( Well.. and Intel processor is not so inefficient nowadays. Although Mhz myth is right, but Apple's propaganda exaggerates it. )
Second, people seems to think that multiple processor machine is faster than single processor machine. It's wrong!
It depends on situation. If two process have lots of dependency each other, and they are scheduled on two processors, it can be slower than single processor machine. Because there is no enough parallelism.
Well, I take the result for grant.
However, it shows that Apple's dual processor machine is very efficient although it's too slow for competing current Intel processor machines.
Can't you see that?
You should consider the prices then, now.
I think Apple's H/W is too expensive.
Nowadays you can buy good $400~600 machines with 2Ghz processors. How much does the PowerMac cost?
I will buy more PCs than to buy one PowerMac and
enjoy the independence of each machines.
I think that Apple knows that current PowerPCs are too slow for competition.
Apple advertises like this, "World first 17" notebook", "fastest notebook", "fastest desktop machine" ( Do you remember the Macintosh II FX? )
However nowadays they don't say so.
Let's wait until next generation of PowerPC is announced. ( However I don't expect that Apple will introduce computers with that processor with competitive price tag. )
Thats irrelevant, thats 10-bit per channel processing ON THE GPU, and provides absolutely no benefit to software like Adobe Photoshop, which must do > 8 bit (16-bit/channel in PS) colour manipulation *in the software*. It isn't really feasible to use the hardware for this. All that 10-bit/channel means is that your colours in a 3D rendered scene are going to look a little prettier (e.g. fewer banding effects etc) because there is greater accuracy in various *real-time rendering* calculations - the loss in these calculations then fall into the lower few bits, which then ANYWAY get trucated to 8-bits per channel for the final output buffer (and thus you're only getting 8-bit/channel resolution on your monitor anyway).
It's not quite clear on most of the tests based on a quick glance if the tests were done using USB devices.
Macs (because they are pushing firewire) do not support USB2, only USB1. So if the tests (except for the obvious firewire one) were using USB devices the tests are faulty in themselves.
However, speed is not that critical of a factor for the average consumer, usabiity is! It is so much easier to quickly get tasks done on my mac than when I was using windows.
Mac's are just crappy Amigas! PC's are discombobulated abominations!
LoNg LiVe the CHECK, baby!
P.S. Posted with a PC (but i would have posted with my AMIGA if it were here!)
P.P.S Damn you all!
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,805492,00.asp
I have to agree that when screwing around with writing OS-X apps for my powerbook, it seemed like there were a zillion different Apple APIs that didn't seem especially well organized or well-documented. However, porting a full-screen 3D game to SDL/OpenGL was pretty easy (although sad to say, even when testing it on an 800Mhz iMac w/ a GeForce, the performance is not that impressive, probably mainly due to memory bandwidth issues. (The GameCube is pretty zippy with a 486 MHz PPC attached to 24 MB of very speedy RAM by comparison...)[ed: do you have a point?]
However, I still love using my Powerbook, because it works well, looks cool, and it's nice using an OS that looked like had some real graphic designers involved. It's also nice to have a UNIX box with a "real" GUI, although it would have been nice if mach/darwin was a little less "different". A CPU/memory bus that could compete with Intel would be nice, too.
I think one of the best features of OS-X is that applications are just self-contained .app directories, not the multiarmed monstrosities that put a zillion files in Windows/System, do who knows what to the registry, replace some shared dll used by some other app, etc, etc. My Win2K machine at work is rock solid, because I only run 4NT, epsilon, command-line compilers, and Outlook Express. All the artists, however, who do things like run photoshop or install scanners get no end of trouble on identical machines. (Not that I haven't had issues with my powerbook--basically all computers suck, I guess.)
Hmm, this is pretty rambling. Final score:
Windows: 3 chili peppers
Mac: 29.3 bootie points
linux: B+
OS/2: thank you for playing...
The fact is that the tools used by pro photographers may not be optimized for the Mac, making it way slower in real life application today. They don't care about the potential speed if manufacturers were to optimize their software, they care about speed now.
Anyway, the Mac came close or on top in only a couple of the many Photoshop tests, otherwise, it was in general soundly beaten.
The sad thing is that this is a fight on the Mac's home turf, and it's losing. 2.5 GHz worth of PowerPC was coming in far behind 3 GHz of PC.
There is no way that any Sony VAIO is better or cheaper than a similarly configured iBook or PowerBook, period.
...) for free while MS Visual Studio .NET alone would cost him $2500 or more. Further more, he can now enjoy music and view photos and burn CDs and make movies and chat with friends and backup files and surfing the Web, while program in Java at the same time, with no extra cost. In contrast, the Sony with 512 MB RAM would become very slow just for programming Java. And of course, there are so many free or open sources Unix programs which are either unavailable or doesn't work properly on Windows, and OS X is just more solid and elegant than Windows XP.
My brother-in-law just bought a 12" iBook for $999 to repalce his 14" Sony bought less a year old, and he couldn't be more happier. He is a programmer and has been a PC user all his life and still owns 4 Wintel PCs, now he hardly use them for many reasons. His Sony is over 8 lbs and gets really hot after 30 minutes of use and lasts no more than 2 hrs with 2 fully charged batteries, while the iBook is 4.5 lbs and can carries on for 4 to 5 hrs with a single batteries. But the bigger deal for him is that Mac OS X gives him so many powerful programming tools (Project Builder, Interface Builder, GCC 3.1, Objective C/C++, Java, Perl, Ruby
I am a programmer myself, and do everything on my 700 MHz iBook which feels more responsive than a 1.8 GHz 16" Sony Vaio I once played with for a couple of hrs. To start with, when there are more than a few open windows and you drag a window around, all the little icons on the Sony desktop start flickering which is very disturbing to the eyes. The graphics and text just look sharper on the iBook than on the Sony. The iBook can sleep and wake up instantaneously, while the Sony takes much longer and doesn't always wake up.
Did you actaully read my post or just skim it? I use the Sony as a desktop mostly, so the bigger the better. I don't give a shit what it weighs or how hot it gets or how long the batterie lasts because it usually doesn't go anywhere. I do, howerever, have the option to easily move it if I want to. It has a great screen (1600x1200) and all the hardware I need. Secondly, I run Debian so I don't give a shit what programming tools OS X comes with or how much Visual Studio .NET costs.
OS X users are just apologists who need pretty GUIs with dancing buttons and don't want to actually learn how to use a computer while still attempting to get the credability and respect that Linux users do. Go play.
Oh, I see, so this article was only intended for people who edit lots of video in hotel rooms.
Laptops that have to be located a few feet from a wall outlet all the time to offer decent performance is not a legitimate market segment. Of course, the only reason Intel gets away with this is that 99% of consumers don't find out about the underclocking "technology" until they've already bought the machines.
If you want to pay several thousand dollars for the luxury of being able to compute at desks other than ones that already have desktops on them and nothing more, then go ahead, but don't pretend that's what normal people really want.
Also, a laptop with desktop processor is no better for gaming than a normal laptop -- they have LCD screens -- fundamentally too slow display tech for fast gaming. It doesn't matter what framerate you'd be getting on a CRT if all you've got is an LCD where even scrolling in browser looks like 3fps. Then again I guess u'll claim that the article was written for people who carry around extra CRTs to use along with their portable desktop laptops.
Lost the <. "PPC*2<PPC@2xMHz"