Slashdot Mirror
Better Business Bureau Targets Apple's G5 Ads
deathazre writes "The Council of Better Business Bureaus has suggested Apple Computer withdraw its claims of the world's fastest, and first 64-bit, PC after a complaint by Dell. However, even having one of their ads banned in the U.K. didn't stop them here in the States."
My silly Alpha workstation from 1992 must not be 64 bit!
Maybe you can say it's a workstation and not a PC but later Alphas ran Windows NT which in my mind makes it a PC for sure.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
Boy, Apple fans have really hung their self-worth on this VA Tech cluster. Used to be Photoshop benchmarks, now it's LinPack or whatever.
Lots of people use Itaniums for clustering as well -- doesn't mean that Itaniums make for a good Personal Computer.
Hey, don't my Digital Multias use a 64-bit Alpha processor? Pretty sure. Even ran 64-bit VMS after a bunch of fiddling.
Again, either you misheard or misremembered, or you are a liar and you are lying for attention, which is a form of trolling.
Apple is implying that software-based prefetching will be turned on by default for the shipping systems, yet it was turned off for the benchmark. This suggests that turning software-based prefetching off was another trick that won't work in the real world, like the special malloc.
(Joswiak did not know whether this malloc, which is faster but less memory efficient, will be the default in the shipping systems).
Why didn't you find out then?? If the issue was important enough to respond, why didn't you take 5 minutes to call someone who would know the answer to that question? Because you already knew the answer to the question, but didn't want to say it, because it is embarrassing. The answer to the question is tucked away in the Veritest report, where you hoped that most people wouldn't read it. The Veritest report says that the malloc used is "unsuitable for many uses". Furthermore, even if the malloc WAS suitable for real-world use, Apple's credibility is shot to pieces because they used it for the G5 benchmark but NOT for the Dell benchmark.
You would get more respect from people if you would just be honest. I'm NOT saying you have to list all the negative points about your products. Reviewers and your competitors can do that. But when you list positive points about your products, they should be honest.
What is your target market? With the price of those G5's, you must be targeting professionals. Therefore, professionals would appreciate it if you treated them like intelligent people.
I challenge Apple to show the world what they are made of. Go on, show the world that you are a company of integrity. Remove the claim "The Power Mac G5 is the world's fastest personal computer". Replace it with something more accurate, for example something like, "The Power Mac G5 is one of the world's fastest personal computers." That is still an impressive statement. You should be PROUD that you have ONE of the world's fastest personal computers. There is no need to deliberately mislead people.
Everyone makes mistakes, I know I've made plenty. People will quickly forgive you for this mistake if you correct it. Show the world how much you respect your customers by amending your claim to "The Power Mac G5 is one of the world's fastest personal computers."
On the other hand, if you continue to claim that the G5 is "THE world's fastest personal computer", then the message you are sending to the world is that honesty and accuracy in marketing is unimportant to you, and you couldn't care less about your customers, provided that they keep spending money on your products.
The devil is in the details. Was Digital's Alpha, which happened to be 64bit and came out in 1992, a personal computer?
Earlier up in the thread, Apple are supposedly better than Dell because the 3rd fastest supercomputer is made up of Macs! - How on earth does *that* count as a personal computer? Oh, I guess Macs do and don't count as a personal computer, to suit the context.
Could your grandmother run her favorite applications and check her email on it?
Given that most computer-ignorant people's favourite applications run only on Windows, a Mac isn't a personal computer by that measure.
There are two meanings of personal computer that I'm aware of: a computer that one person uses, or an IBM compatible. The only reason we might not count an Alpha as a personal computer, but we did other computers, is because an Alpha was considered high-end. But using that definition, Apple's claim amounts to a tautology: "Mac's are the first computers that are 64bit, if we ignore the computers that were 64bit before us (and as a result weren't considered personal computers)".