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Apple Responds to Adobe
Thargok333 writes "Apple calls out Adobe on the 'PC is Faster' article linked from the Adobe website. They state that it is an After Effects bug, which they are working close to Adobe to fix. With Adobe's idea of G4 optimization, I am not impressed that a 'single 1.25 GHz G3' gets beat by a P4 3 GHz."
Well.. duh.
Now show me the Apple benchmarking tool written by Apple that'll exersize Apple operating system tricks and I'm sold!
Oh wait, you just did.
http://www.remix.net/
***News Flash*** IBM Restarts G3 Production In a move deemed to promote older processors, IBM has continued production of its G3 line. In its latest press release, it announced that it has incorportaed the new 1.25GHz processor into a special edition Macintosh dubbed the "1.25 GHz G3 model." Our sources speculate that this may indeed not be the case, and that this was just a typo. More details as they emerge.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Two computers enter! One Computer leaves! Two computers enter! One Computer leaves! Two computers enter! One Computer leaves! Two computers enter! One Computer leaves! Two computers enter! One Computer leaves! Two computers enter! One Computer leaves! Two computers enter! One Computer leaves! Two computers enter! One Computer leaves!
I hope Steve Jobs takes this beyond Thunderdome!
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
So the graphs have just been reversed caus apple talked to Adobe?
With Adobe's idea of G4 optimization
How about a native program first?
Quartz? What's that?
These are bus bandwidth-intensive operations. Given that the fastest Mac has DDR266 memory and it's not banked for parallel access or otherwise arranged for additional benefit, what aspect of the G4 architecture do you believe should be giving it an edge in these bandwidth-constrained tasks?
Between PCs vs Macs, and AMD vs Intel, we need a new way of measuring performance that doesn't get tied up in facts and speeds. Might I suggest the Decimal Unit Performance Estimate (DUPE), based on how much you can get done:
1 - Nothing (aka "Jack", "Sod all", "Bugger all")
2 - Something, but barely
3 - Enough to stay awake
4 - Enough to stay employed
5 - Enough to make an actual contribution
6 - Enough to achieve, oh, what's it called, oh yes "job satisfaction" (avoided obvious orgasm joke)
7 - Loads
8 - Loads and loads
9 - Shedloads
10 - Absolute Shedloads
The reader is left to assign the ranking to each system.
Cheers, Paul
Of course Apple will reject claims that their machines are slow, but sooner or later they're going to have to do something about it. I run straightforward CPU intensive programs such as XML processors, and for them Macs are roughly 20% slower *per MHz* than Intel and AMD processors. Given that the clock speeds of the fastest x86s are more than twice those of the fastest Macs, I can run three times as fast on a Linux or BSD machine costing the same as a Mac.
No amount of tweeking to use special purpose instructions or multiple processors is going to beat that in the long term, so if the PPC people don't do something about it soon, Apple will have to switch. Of course that would be a very expensive move, but fortunately Apple can hope that just the threat of it will be enough to make Motorola and IBM pull their fingers out.
Quite often the argument is "who has the bigger number"? The PC processor is often attractive due to it's higher number versus... a Mac. Obviously it isn't an "apples to apple" comparison, different architectures rarely are.
The number of cycles for your pipeline, versus the number of concurrent threads of execution through the same pipelines?
I've always considered the intel family to be a very racy and fast sports cars. Versus other processors which tend to be a little slower trucks. They don't go as fast, but they carry more payload. In today's market of "multi-tasking", well written programs can take advantage of a processor that doesn't get bogged down with "stalled" pipes. Also the frequency can only be "cranked up" so high...
There is also a focus on where is Adobe commiting their development work. There is a lot to be said for programs written and developed natively, versus those which must be ported over to other platforms. Carmack originally developed on the Mac first for Q3, due to the inherent limitations for that platform. That made porting it to Linux and Windows much easier.
Too often the HZ on the processor is used as a crutch to explain away the lack of development know-how (or lack of funding) for multiple Operating Systems. There are so many products on the market today that are only support on 2k/NT. Sadly any port to another OS is dismally lacking... and the platform is blamed for this.
Is Adobe still focusing the majority of their development on Apple? Was the conversion from OS9 to OSX too difficult for them to handle? Are they writing native code? I think it was reckless for Adobe to make the blanket statement that PC is faster, and sounds more like some internal pissing match between the companies.
"I am not impressed that a 'single 1.25 GHz G3' gets beat by a P4 3 GHz."
Actually it was a dual 1.25 GHz G4.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
Seriously though, whatever you make of the original benchmarks, they were oviously a thorn in Apple's side or they wouldn't have responded.
I'll try to give an honest answer. I have this very same argu^H^H^H^Hconversation with one of the developers I work with pretty frequently. To give you a bit of background, I am a software developer on multiple platforms including Mac OS X, but I spend most of my time on Windows.
Performance in a given task is not defined by frontside bus bandwidth. It is defined in the amount of useful work done in a given time.
All things being equal, the computer platform with the highest raw performance should perform more useful work in a given time. But things are never equal. How many different parts of the operating system and application are mixed in with the process? How many different developers of varying skill levels have added code to the process? Under normal circumstances, a given algorithm can vary between log n and n-squared processing time, depending on the quality of the developer's insight to the problem at hand.
Perhaps an analogy: put me on a Suzuki GSX-R1000 and let me race against Nicky Hayden on a GSX-R600. By rights, I've got almost twice the horsepower. But there is no freakin' way I'll get around a racetrack faster! Objective fact: the raw performance of the GSX-R1000 is higher. Objective fact: the GSX-R600 made it around the racetrack faster. Conclusion: the raw performance of the platform was not the dominant factor in the test.
So, do I expect the Mac to be faster? No, I expect it to be slower. But I will not argue when I am presented with meaningful benchmarks which contradict that presumption, either. What those benchmarks are saying is that the variables other than raw performance are dominating the equation.
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
steve dosent lie an appel rules pcs suck they are running dos appel is 64 bit now you drool apple is hi tech you havent herd of unics we got it you dont eat it pcs steve ballmer is sweaty and macs are millon times faster PC crash allot two mac nevar crash I seen switch commershal xp crahs ever ysingle time all time 5 minutes crash not liek mac MAC RUEL!!!
I think that Adobe is quite lazy. Why you ask?
I've heard that a good amount of the base code in their products is in Pascal. While I don't know if this is true, it would also imply a helluva lot of 68k code still lurking about in their software. Going through both 68k emulation as well as another compatibility API is just bad. I hope this is not the case.
Also, could one think that they are not optimizing their new PPC Carbon/Cocoa code as much for the platform? Surely the difference between a coder and a good coder could be measured in application performance, at least somewhat. While I hate math, getting better performance takes finding the time-consuming calculations and reducing it all to the easiest possible operations.
Why not put some thought into making performance better rather than making gee-whiz features that most folks never asked for.
And that Apple has been able to tweak MUCH better performance and features out of products like the Final Cut series shows that it CAN be done. Is Adobe really wanting to spend the time and effort it needs to in order to get performance to an acceptable level?
God forbid, someone might have to write some stuff in ASM to get results. Blasphemy!
As Vince Lombardi once said:
"You can't make a chicken sandwich out of chicken shit."
I'm a software developer, so my machine needs only modest requirements. Mostly a copy of PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Apache, etc, and a decent text editor (BBEdit or NEdit preferred).
Last summer I left a job where I was working full time on an AMD 1.5GHZ with 512MB RAM and a 7200 IDE drive. It ran Red Hat 7.2 and Gnome 1.4. It was WAY more than sufficient for my needs.
I left and moved my work onto a TiBook 667MHZ with 512MB RAM. Performance difference of the machine? Negligible. Performance difference of myself? Huge.
The truth is I really like both Gnome and OSX, but in terms of the "it just works" factor, OSX has a huge lead on everyone. Apple has the ability to accomplish something rare in human interface design: To be simple enough for the newbies to be comfortable, without compromising the power. No other system does this as well (yet).
My other home system is an AMD 1800+ (1.5GHZ) also with 512MB RAM. There's no real difference in system performance for 90% of what I do. Still, I only use that machine for testing and bug tracking, and spend countless hours perfectly satisfied with my TiBook. It's about personal preference though, in the end.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
Actually, yes. The vast majority of graphics houses use Macs. They care very much about how fast filters run.
I have a very good friend who works in a billboard production house. They are often dealing with 40GB (yes, gigabyte) photoshop files. If a single filter they used performed badly, that could well be hours (or even days) lost on the machines performing those transforms.
I thought that photoshop had a 2GB file limit?
Automated DNA sequencing software
No amount of tweeking to use special purpose instructions or multiple processors is going to beat that in the long term, so if the PPC people don't do something about it soon, Apple will have to switch.
How about a 900MHz front-side BUS like the IBM 970 has? Would that help at all?
-- thinkyhead software and media
Hz?
.. typing this from an 800 MHz iBook. Sluggish at times, but whatever. I prefer it to the other options despite the increased speed I might get by "switching" to x86.
(oh man thats bad..)
I thought the G4 FP improvements were because it intrinsically routed some of those ops through the AltiVec units.
AFAIK, the G4 was a G3 with SMP circuitry and AltiVec units, at least in it's first incarnation. It's been a while since it debuted though, and the evidence that the G4 has become more streamlined since branching from the G3 is good (if they are the same 'core' the G3 would be able to clock much higher since it's smaller).
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
What I wouldn't give to have a recent-design G3 in my old blue-n-white.
I wish someone would produce new G3s with giant integral and backside caches, they would absolutely fly on low-end and midrange servers where altivec is nothing more than extra heat to dissipate.
Anyone know of a way to get one of those swanky new 750CXe G3s from the latest iBook into an older blue-and-white? They're different pinouts and voltages from my POV.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
BUT I cant think of any reason someone would need a 40GB Photoshop file, the lpi on billboard prints is so low that even screen resolution is overkill, I can only guess they are using photoshop for layout which they really shouldn't be doing, that's what quark / indesign are for, really bugs me when some muppet sends in a massively over dpi'd file for output.
Why was the prior article on this displayed on the front page, but this one only shows up under Apple?
mbbac
40GB stills files? FUCK OFF! if you need to make files with 20 megapixels of detail and about 500 layers then you can ONLY be working for the spooks with spy satellite images. Anyway, last time I checked, Photoshop had a file size limit of a couple of GBs.
That was classic intercourse!
To understand the above you first have to attend some kind of primary / elementary school.
That was classic intercourse!
Hmm.. I use to do billboard printing/design work. First off, Photoshop has a 2GB-3.5GB size limit. As far as the printing process is concerned, older large format printers could only do between 20dpi-70dpi ... using uncompressed TIFF CMYK files for output, on a standard 20'x50' billboard, this would yield a file around 219MB - 1GB+ per layer. Granted, given the viewing distance factor of a billboard, these graphics would generally be printed at only 10dpi yielding an effective TIFF size of 54MB.
However, given the current level of technology in this segment of the printing market, most (if not all) large format printers will now use Postscript files as input, so much of the design is done like traditional desktop publishing (quark, indesign, illustrator) and then rasterized on usualy a multiprocessor PC-based RIP (raster image processor).
In anycase, getting back to the original poster .. just because graphic houses are currently using Macs is not a representation of them being faster. It is simply a case of being what they have used for years. Many places that I do consulting work for (as well as where I previously worked) offload all of their heavy processing requirements to the fastest systems they can find, Mac or PC .. lately they have been buying PCs ..
Native != Cocoa, my friend. Or rather, not all native apps are Cocoa, nor are all Cocoa apps native (I doubt you'd call a Cocoa/Java app "native", for example).
Carbon is every bit as native as Cocoa. It is true that Apple was too lenient in its backward-compatibility measures; by not forcing developers to take advantage of new technologies while porting their apps, we've seen the rise of Bad Carbon Ports, epitomized by (ironically) AppleWorks but seen to lesser degrees in other apps as well. However, a Carbon app which actually uses OSX technologies can be not just every bit as fast as a Cocoa app, but even somewhat faster if it's done right.
Cocoa is good. Carbon can be good, though it does have some Bad Stuff that, regrettably, many porting jobs use. But an app is no better simply by virtue of being written in Cocoa or Carbon.
If you want proof of this, simply look at the fact that Apple is slowly re-implementing Cocoa on top of Carbon. Some of this work is already complete and is a part of Jaguar; more is coming. When it is finished, Cocoa will be little more than a layer of abstraction on top of Carbon. How can one be intrinsically better than the other, when this is possible?
I can only speak to multimedia content generation. I have never measured the speed of my PowerMac dual 1GHz with Final Cut Pro against a 3GHz Pentium running Premiere, but I do know that after 3 years of using Adobe's products with third-party hardware and drivers on Windows, I gave up and got a Mac with Apple software.
I bought 4 boxes: PowerMac, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, and a 6-to-4 pin firewire cable for camera. I have never purchased another accessory, peripheral, or software package, and the system is so well designed and executed that I can start an editing session in the morning and mail a 1 hour tape or DVD to a client by 5.
With the Powerbook, I can shoot video and edit it on the plane home. If it's a long plane ride, I'll have the DVD burned before we land, while the guy in the seat next to me fights with his Vaio or Dell (I've been on many flights where some poor bastard gets no work done because Windows eats itself; it's happened to me too).
My experiences over the past 5 years convince me that the Megahertz mongers have got the issues backwards. If you can first show me any combination of PC and laptop hardware on the Intel platform that can do everything I describe above for the exact same price, I will look at the speed of filter application or transition rendering.
My point is that if Apple makes faster machines their superior systems will be better than they are now. If speed is the only improvement a PC with Windows and Adobe products offers, that system is still inferior to the Mac.
I've worked on 4+ GB files.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Nope. The G4 does have FPU upgrades. The G3 was notoriously bad at FPU, a 604e at the same clock rate would beat it in that dept (iirc).
.
Am I confused? I guess I just don't understand the rating system. Must be cause I'm a Mac user.
I *might* consider switching to a PC - if it could run MacOS faster! I love speed as much as the next person, but I love the OS more. I use both daily - and I started out on PCs - the Mac just works... which is what I need. Keeping my wife's 2GHz PC working is a running gunfight. If you subtract all the wasted time patching Windows, all that speed kinda goes out the window.
Sorry - I checked up with him and it's multi-gigabyte files, not 40GB.
...
My bad.
As penance, I went out and did a search for photoshop limits and whilst I couldn't find anything specifically for Photoshop 7, earlier versions at least have a 30,000 pixel limit in any dimension.
However, he does often complain about how slow gigabit ethernet is
I dare you.
And I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that unless you actually go in and investigate the apps before you stick your neck out, you will be wrong somewhere between 33% of the time and 66% of the time.
Leaning towards 50%.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
... god kills a kitten.
Please, think of the kittens.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Adobe, which is a dedicated Apple developer, bashing Apple? That's news.
Apple defending itself? That's not news. I mean, who among you didn't expect this exact article to be out within a day or two?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
In 1997, Adobe started trying to get all of its customers to switch over to Windows from the Mac. This was when the Mac was in a really bad way, and Adobe simply didn't want to support it.
Ever since then, Adobe has been treating the Mac as a second-class citizen. 'You could die someday', they seem to be saying, 'And we'd just as soon it were tomorrow.' It would be a lot cheaper for them not to have to develop two versions of any of their products, but until the number of Mac users in the businesses they sell to goes down, they can't jettison the Mac versions. So they've been gritting their teeth and bearing it.
And then Apple comes along and makes software that actually competes with them! WHILE they were wishing they could get rid of Apple. If Adobe were a person, that would be a perfect recipe for getting them amazingly mad. 'We wanted to screw you over, and were just waiting for any opportunity... and here you are, screwing US instead!'
Is it any surprise that Adobe will keep selling Mac software (because they have to), but use any convenient opportunity to get as many of their customers to use Windows as they can?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
There is a bigger reason why adobe is dropping support for the Mac. They can't compete with the features of the Gimp and realize in a few years, maybe sooner the Gimp will have more features. Why pay 500 dollars for a Photoshop when you can download the Gimp for free and pay a programmer 250 to add the feature that you need. It's half the cost..
I could have named off about 2/3 of your list without ever opening the app, so it's kind of hard to give you much credit.
Mail, Terminal, and TextEdit are direct derivatives of NeXT apps, and TextEdit is used for just about every demo of how easy it is to program in Cocoa that exists. OmniWeb is by the OmniGroup, a bunch of people dedicated to proving how wonderful Cocoa is.
Photoshop, FreeHand, BBEdit, and iTunes are all obvious and straightforward carbonizations of 9 apps. No points there, either.
As for the rest, I've just started looking through packages, and I will admit that I can't figure out how to figure it out. They all use some cocoa calls: even the two carbon apps that I checked have cocoa calls listed in them. How can I differentiate?
Plus, if you're going to talk about some of them being the result of, for example, Interface Builder, you have to bear in mind that IB works beautifully with Carbon. So be careful, because if what you're saying is 'I don't like non-interface-builder apps' then that's a completely different and basically unrelated discussion to Cocoa vs. Carbon.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Note that I didn't say that I don't line non-IB apps. What I was implying was that IB creates results that emphasize the differences between Carbon and Cocoa.
I was disappointed that the programs I was currently running were so obvious. How about this: Open Backup or iChat. Think about using those programs. Then open up IE or the Script Editor and think about how those programs feel. You can't tell me that -- previous knowledge or not -- the programs aren't clearly different.
Sort of the point of slashdot, in fact.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Fact: Adobe spends significantly more developing for two systems than they would developing for only one.
Fact: Adobe is in business to make money, and has, as most companies do, absolutely no loyalty to anyone except for its stockholders.
Fact: If Adobe were to stop developing for one platform or the other, while it was still a viable platform, it would earn itself enormous ill will, and someone would step in with a replacement. And a good chunk of people would buy the replacement. (Let's just not discuss the GNU replacement here, okay? It's not the point.)
From these three facts we can extrapolate a few things.
Extrapolation: Adobe will not stop making either Macintosh or Windows products while a sizable chunk of their income comes from the platform in question.
Extrapolation: If Adobe could keep all of their customers, while shifting development to one platform, they would do so in a heartbeat.
Extrapolation: The only way the above could happen would be if one of the platforms were to basically die, or everyone using that platform with Adobe software were to switch over to the other platform.
Extrapolation: Since they can't just discontinue their software on one platform without the above problem with it causing massive customer ill-will, the best way to bring about these circumstances is to make it more difficult to live on the platform they wish to kill, while simultaneously telling everyone how much better the other platform is.
Extrapolation: They aren't interested in trying to kill Windows.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
"Ah, now we can be quite certain that you don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about. Carbon is not "ugly-looking." It's just an API. It doesn't look like anything."
Well... actually it does, though it may not be obvious through the User Interface.
It is the difference between looking at handwritten, strict xhtml code and looking at the output from telling MS Word to create an HTML document.
Carbon just feels... unclean in comparison to Cocoa.
Thus, yes, you *can* say that about APIs.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Adobe is still steaming from the olde days when they jacked-up the price of a Postscript license so Apple created TrueType, which out-hinted PostScript Fonts, and licensed it at a much lower rate, which forced Adobe to drop the price on Postscript licenses.
this hasn't been modded up
If they would follow from Adobe to the actual test page, they'd see that the Dell wipes up the floor with the Mac on Photoshop tests, too. Not by such a drastic margin (4.5v7.1s, 35.1v62s, and 3.4v4.5) but how does the AE bug apply there, hmm?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
great analogy. too bad there aren't too many folks who understand it. besides, nicky is going to get spanked for at least a year or two in moto gp. heh.
(no text)
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
So what you're actually complaining about is the interface paradigm, really.
It's perfectly possible to make a carbon app look as much like a cocoa one as you could ever want to. However, there are two 'problems'. First, both of those carbon apps are descendants of MacOS 9 apps, and pretty close descendants at that. Nobody put in a whole lot of time to make them look different from the old ones. They also haven't had a whole lot of attention paid to them to make them fit perfectly into the MacOS X commons. That kind of thing comes for free (or at least very cheap) when you write new software, but takes a lot more work when you're trying to change over from one 'feel' to another.
Number two: the people who write in carbon tend to like the older interface paradigms more than they like the newer ones. You clearly like the newer paradigms. That's fine. But don't mistake this for universality, nor for limitations of Carbon. Cocoa is sweet, great. But carbon is a perfectly viable set of APIs. Saying that it's bad because it's based on the old, grotty Toolbox is like saying C++, Java, C#, and Objective C are bad because they're all based on old, grotty C. I admit that, like C++, Carbon could have been cleaned up better before it was released. But --especially considering its (intriguing) origins -- it seems to me to be quite a nice little package.
[Note: when I talk about the newer paradigms, I mean 'originated at NeXT 14 years ago instead of at Apple 20 years ago.']
Anyway, those are the differences *I* see.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Rather than reply to individual posters all I can do is shake my head at the all-to-predictable lack of vision and Fear Uncertainty and Doubt by users in face of moving away from the methods Adobe has foisted upon them.
This behaviour has been happening online almost since Usenet's inception - with users being afraid of moving from one environment to the next - to the extend that they even defend faults in the current system by decrying them as 'standards' - only to find they are made redundant by more flexible users and those approaching the products from a fresh and untainted perspective. The same arguments have been repeated time and again in the software world and if you know the history of such arguments then the outcome becomes very clear.
I think the failure (of at least one respondent) to see that something as basic as an Aqua based port as an important stepping stone to adoption is a clear demonstration of the lack of vision to which I have alluded. Quite simply, many more users are going to experience the product if an Aquafied version is released, even if it did not entirely behave within the conventions of Mac OS X's Inspector based UI (which it should, but for a product of this nature need not be a priority).
Additionally, in response to another posts, the differences in UI with Film Gimp (or CinePaint - the new name change is not yet complete) are not nearly as significant as some would mislead users to believe - the majority of the interface (such as selectors) are actually identical in both.
You may be afraid of change you may fail to compare the product on a open bases (despite that I am sure many of you will deny you are doing this, you will at the same time openly declare that 'GIMP should follow the conventions in PhotoShop because it is the current dominant application'), but you will simply be made irrelevant by the next generation of designers who have a new fresh approach to design and who are untainted by pre-conceptions about how a particular program should behave, or brand loyalty to Adobe.
I often see this as one difference between good and bad software engineers - while one should not jump on foolish vendor driven bandwagons, a good software engineer is able to adopt a new methodology or language that has an entirely new paradigm and requires a significant re-working of his typical design approach - if he can objectively see that this newer approach is on balance better than his existing approach. A bad engineer, on the other hand, will lack such objectivity and cling defensively to the approach he already understands, because it is more convenient.
Right on! I'm with ya, man! Wish I had some moderator points right now!
Pooty tweet
Had the original poster READ the article he was posting about rather than skimmed, he would have seen that the test pitted top of the line consumer grade X-86 hardware against top of the line Dual G4 Mac hardware... to quote the article:
"The showdown pitted a single-processor Dell 3.06GHz Pentium 4 and a 1.25GHz dual-processor Power Mac G4 (the fastest Mac then available). The contest compared renderings of files created in Adobe After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop software." Source:
Incidentally, a single processor P4 machine is not by any means top of the line PC hardware. Perhaps they are too embarrassed to show what would happen with top of the line X-86 hardware (non-server class, lets stick to workstation vs. workstation hardware)... A Dual Intel Xeon processor (Xeons are currently running at a peak of 3.06 Ghz) box with a workstation class graphics accelerator instead of the gaming graphics cards you can get for the mac (GeForce 4 IS a gaming graphics card!... THIS is a workstation graphics card)... I betcha price is comparable at that level of X-86 hardware.
Not to mention, to add insult to injury for Apple, the single processor Pentium 4 3.06 Ghz PC (which I'm sure retailed for $1000 - $2000 USD less than the Apple box) whipped the Power Mac in EVERY category of the comparison. I'm sure Apple's own proprietary "equivalent" software runs faster on MacOS than the Adobe software. Perhaps they should open some of the tricks they are hiding to accomplish that to Adobe, one of the companies that made Apple what it is today!
Oh yeah, and one day, if Apple has the balls, they should compare top PC-Workstation hardware to top Mac-Workstation hardware. To make it fair (and cut the whining), limit the PC-Workstation to the retail price of a top of the line Mac-Workstation (that is currently $3,799 without a monitor!)... then compare those machines and see the embarrasing truth (well, embarrasing to Apple, who claims that the "turbocharged Power Mac rips through digital video and 3D projects faster than Pentiums can say 'uncle.' " Source:)
I wish Apple would move to X86... if they can convince people of that much BS and stir up what can only be called religious Mac worship, they would probably do great (and make much more profit) if they switch OSX to X86 and built the same PowerMacs on X86 hardware... maybe the Opteron, who knows :) They've got enough of a name where they could just pull it off and, aesthetically speaking, they are ahead of the X86 world, for now. Plus, being *nix based now, it should be a simpler move than it would have been before!
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr