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Ars Technica Reviews Intel iMacs
Milton Waddams writes "Ars kick off what I'm sure will be a torrent of reviews of the of the new Intel iMac. Overall it looks like it's a bit faster than the iMac G5 and a bit slower than the PowerMac G5 dual core. I'm sure it will surprise many slashdotters to find out that Jobs' statements about the new iMac being twice as fast as the iMac G5 as being slightly over optimistic. AND it doesn't run Windows...yet..." I'm still waiting for the most important benchmark: frames per second in molten core combat.
AND it doesn't run Windows...yet...
Why is there all this talk about running windows on it? Honestly, it's like buying a new Porsche and ripping out the engine and putting a Dodge Neon engine in it.
You want to run Windows and play your precious games and whatnot? Buy a cheap-o Dell. The entire Mac experience is the beautiful combination of hardware and software.
--- witty signature
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an iMac (a new dual core G5 2gighz w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this iMac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, the new firefox build will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various iMacs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a iMac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' identical chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2 gighz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an iMac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
it's a joke, laugh
"I'm sure Intel will -- in time -- crush the G5 in performance."
Oh yeah, sure Intel will...
Just like they always will - next year. Or is it the year after that where 'the good stuff' from Intel is supposed to show up?
Apple's quad-G5 absolutely DESTROYS anything Intel or AMD is or will be shipping this year in both price and performance. Unless, of course, you want to play games with Intel and their SPEC complier through synthetic benchmarks.
Apple is fucked in the workstation market. IBM has made it clear that not only did they dump Apple, but that they dumped Apple for good. Apple is essentially locked out of Cell technology unless Sony for some crazy reason decides to let Apple in on the party. Don't hold your breath.
Jobs' incompetence in dealing with IBM over the past few years has effectively killed Apple desktop and server hardware. Any hope of IBM coming to Apple's rescue as Intel's roadmap continues to crumble is pointless.
PowerPC/Cell is taking over embedded, media, games, and a bunch of other high performance computing applications, see Mercury Systems. And Apple is stuck with VIIV???
What a disaster. (See NeXT for a good example of what's in store for Apple over the next year to two)
I thought everyone knew that the proper /. question was, “but does it run Linux?” Back to Trolling 101...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Stability.
It doesn't matter if you run a couple of percentages faster if you aren't stable.
PPC is stable. Intel/AMD does not have a history of being stable with THIS architecture. The ix86 architecture was flawed from the day intel decided to put backwards compatibility on the top of the requirement list.
Not saying intel couldn't do better. Anyone remember the i432? They had the ability, but instead decided to go with a crippled chip.
---- Booth was a patriot ----