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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."
As the Apple Turns has an insightful take on the whole thing. I had never heard of the Dell cluster in Buffalo. Bummer for Buffalo.
Boom Shanka
Made out?
Hmm.
While Apple's iPod sales remain strong -- the company sold 730,000 iPods in its last quarter and had pre-release orders for 100,000 iPod mini music players -- Bachman said the company's G5 sales could turn out to be disappointing for the second quarter in a row.
For its fiscal first quarter, which ended Dec. 27, Apple shipped 206,000 G5 computers, short of many analysts' estimates. Bachman has estimated that Apple would ship 195,000 G5s in its current quarter.
Sounds like it didn't work to me. They hardly 'made out' on that one.
It may be fastest, and may have been the cheapest 64 bit desktop PC system on introduction. A problem with making the claim now is that that eMachines has been selling Athlon 64 systems at about $1000 for three months now.
Apple has long shelved the ad campaign though.
Yeah. I especially like the Intel Centrino laptop commercials where someone is in the middle of the fucking ocean or on the airport runway surfing the internet.
"Intel Centrino Lets You Unwire Your Life. Now you can enjoy a truly mobile lifestyle!"
Unless Intel advocates wardriving, I don't see how it's truly mobile. This is far more deceptive to me than G5 ads, which were just designed to let people know that Apple isn't behind times with its processor speed anymore, albeit the wording was amplified to drive the point home.
Trying to see whether an ad campaign has succeeded or failed based on the number of sales versus what was predicted in a given quarter is kind of like trying to infer causal effects for a graph showing correlation between two independently measured variables with no other data--a big mistake.
Whether an ad succeeds or fails often cannot be measured based on sales in a fluctuating economy with a variable product interest. The critical question is would they have sold 206k G5 computers if they had not run the ad campaign? There is also the corollary question of would they could have sold more with a different ad campaign?
The first of these questions is nontrivial to answer and requires good, well researched data on why your customers are buying the product. Apple may have that data--you most certainly do not. The latter is almost impossible to infer even with good data on people's purchasing.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Well, speed is a simple, measureable and quantifiable concept.
Speed in computers is not "simple" and it is not easily quantifiable. Case in point, take the Earth Simulator--rated as the fastest computer in the world right now on the Top500. Any computer scientists could write a program where it would perform painfully slowly compared to a computer with a processor from years ago simply because of how it works and the way it is designed: lots of processors that are good at one and only one thing--vector processing.
"Speed" with computer begs the fundamental question of "speed at what? I don't think intel's chips offer an FMADD instruction, for instance, which is part of the reason why the G5 is so impressive--it can field two of them per clock cycle. At integer based DSP the G5 is not going to be nearly as impressive--this isn't exactly a first past the post kind of thing
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Apple had the claim to fame for a few months fair and square. They don't run those commercials anymore anyway...and again why does Dell care...they don't sell AMD chips either!!!
First, the process is NOT tedious, at least in North Carolina. You fill out a form online, and mail it in. Also, our BBB shows how many complaints the company has had total, how many resolved, and how many unresolved. That tends to show people what type of business is being run. For example, our local Compusa has over 1000 complaints. 'Bout 1/2 of those are actually resolved.
I know this because I had to file a complaint against a local company. They were pretty upset to have any mark on the BBB site.
How do you measure the speed of a computer?
Is a 3 GHz P4 with 4 MB RAM faster than a 1.6 GHz G5 with 16 GB RAM? Not likely. So it's not [only] the clock frequency of the CPU that matters.
A fast computer is, IMHO, one which allows me to perform a certain task in a short time. Think about it - isn't this what _really_ matters? Can I write my essays in a shorter time on a 2 GHz G5 than an old iMac? Not really.
Comparing Macs and Windows machines, I'd say Macs have always been faster, and will likely be for quite some time. Since the G5 is the fastest Mac, I'd say it's the fastest computer.
My two cents.
Sig Nature