Slashdot Mirror
Intel Mac Performance Behind Hype
Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.' MacWorld (the publication) has been putting the iMacs through their paces. The results are a good deal less impressive than Steve's boast, showing an average performance increase of 10 to 25 per cent while performing a series of everyday tasks with software specially designed for the new systems." Ars Technica had another perspective on the new systems earlier this week.
another no-substance complaint about Apple. if you even saw Steve you'd see he specifically gave numbers for integer and floating point performance and pointed out that clearly other spec such as HDD speed weren't doubled.
anyone expecting 2-3X in "real" programs (not pure number crunching) is either
1. retarded
2. deliberately acting retarded to bitch about Apple
Since when? I have never known Steve Jobs to overhype Apple products with fictitious performance claims and grand statements like "Super Computer for your Desktop".
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
No, no it does not. Steve Jobs was very specific about 2-3 times faster being for the specINT benchmark. Ignoring that and talking focusing on the 2-3 times claim is dishonest, plain and simple. Sure, the 2-3 times faster marketing claim is equally dishonest... I'm sure we'll get Apple to stop that kind of marketing when everyone else in the world does the same. Duh.
This article is not only a dupe, it's a dupe of a troll. It's not news, it doesn't matter, and repeatedly seeing such crap really, really has me ( a VERY avid and longtime slashdot reader ) seriously considering not reading slashdot.
I mean, really, if I have to sort through repeated, lame, uninformative news stories, I can scan Yahoo news, Digg, or any other number of sources. Articles like this are just here to stoke the fires of people who know they're crap. I can only assume the reason we're seeing this article is that the last one on the same subject generated a large number of posts... most of them saying the article is crap.
Slashdot's value lies in interesting tech stories not covered everywhere else, with the number of stories being filtered and small, along with insightful commentary by informed readers. I didn't mind too much the first iteration of this story, but the dupe is just so much trolling for pageviews. Really, it may be time for slashdot to consider some sort of article-moderation. Or maybe we should all start voting ourselves, with lots of "Mod Article Down" posts on crap articles like this. Heck, I might just start doing it myself... my Excellent karma is likely to die, but like I care anymore...
How is this misleading when the purpose is to compare the single proc g4 powerbook or the single proc g5 imac to the new intel counterparts with the 2 cores?
He is comparing the spec power of the system he is selling to the user, or, even looking at just the chip level, he is comparing the two chips they have, one just happens to have 2 cores.
He wants to re-asure the Apple community that the switch to the new processor makes sense.
Now what I want to see is how he justifies people switching from the dual core dual proc g5 towers.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
"Build cheap, claim big, advertise huge...no wonder the stock market can't get enough of Steve Jobs. I'd envy a man who has the ability to charge above market prices for a near commodity product(a PC) and in the process command a cultish following among the buyers."
You have got to hand it to Steve. He discovered that the overdone design of his computers would somehow make closeted homosexuals forget the pain and frustration of the lie filled lives they live. I mean who would have known -- changing fonts and screwing around with the hip (and completely useless) iLife software would cause the average closet cockgobbler great pleasure even though his life is a fraud and he wishes for nothing more than to be sodomized by a fat hairy black man and then forced to do other acts which I would not describe in detail.
And thus Steve has managed to fill an enviable and very profitable business niche. But it gets even better. The throngs of closeted Apple fans (as they like to call themselves) obviously have an imaginary sadomasochistic relationship with Steve. In this case Steve's enourmous ego and his eagerness to abuse his customers more than make up for the fact that he is not as fat and hairy and dark-skinned as their usual fantasies require. Steve, ever the businessman, can easily turn these sadomasochistic fantasies into cold hard profit. He can overcharge his customers wildly on standard commdoity PC hardware, such as memory, video cards, monitors, by making small modifications on such hardware, so only the stuff supplied by Apple can be used. He can force his customers to buy new OS's every couple of years and to buy whole new computers every 5 to 6 years in order to be able to run up to date software. If any other company tried to do this, its customers would revolt. But Apple customers do not mind. In fact they like it.
Honestly I cannot say I like this state of affairs. Even though I have jokingly referred to Apple fans with some naughty names, I do care about them and want them to be truly happy. And I can't help but think that the pleasures these people experience in front of their Macs are not substantial or meaningful. Apple fans would be much happier if they admitted their homosexuality and maybe tried to start a meaningful relationship with the fat hairy man of their most secret dreams. And Steve Jobs only delays the day of reconing when the Apple fan must face his own nature, by offering said Apple fan the meaningless and superficial distractions of his white shiny toys.
From the keynote:
"Now everything's not going to run 2-3X. You know the disks aren't 2-3X faster, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, 2 to 3 times faster." -- Steve Jobs
Oh, sorry, you were using your post to bitch about a bunch of other off-topic Apple things that didn't have to do with the discussion while praising your expensive nuclear laptop with the 1 hour battery life. My bad.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Yeah every generation of product rip they do he claims it's faster and better for the kool-aid drinkers. Today Apple announced the iTurd with Steve Jobs claiming it runs out of your anus 3 times as fast as the last one.
But the point is that they haven't...
32-bit drivers for a lot of older hardware were provided by microsoft and not the individual vendors in any case
With the exception of standard and universal drivers like ATAPI and SVGA, most drivers WERE supplied by vendors, not Microsoft.
By contrast, the sourcecode for these drivers is available for linux
This is true, but on a more limited scale than what people relize. Not all vendors provide the source for drivers, and many of the drivers are user created versions that A) Are not 100% compliant with the hardware B) Don't support all the features of the hardware.
So sure, you can say there are more 64bit drivers, but just like with my Epson example, I could say by using the ESC/2 drier variant, that I support all the epson printers. This does not mean I can use the CD printing features, the higher resolutions, or many of the other advanced features. (This is just an example, not a basis for argument.)
So in order to run 64bit windows on my existing AMD64 machine, i need a new nic, new videocard, and new soundcard...
Actually, NO... As you said the drivers that were SUPPLIED to Microsoft, even if they didn't write them, have been ported to 64bit versions. WindowsXP 64bit STILL supports MORE hardware than any 64bit Linux. PERIOD.
In fact, it supports more drivers than any 32bit Linux even.
So your argument has basis, it is just not refelected in reality.
And also BTW, when people in the Windows world DON'T have a 64bit driver for some strange piece of hardware, what do you think they do? They create their own, just like people in the Linux world do... When it comes down to it, there is no difference,
Windows users are NOT any more reliant on vendors than Linux users. Unless you have an inside track of vendors releasing driver source code to Linux users that Windows users can't see... And this doesn't happen.
Even when vendors release source for their drivers, Windows developers can grab the source and create a driver just as fast as a Linux user. PERIOD.
Not to mention the fact that i need to get a floppy drive so i can load SATA drivers to even install windows...
32bit windows won't install without a floppy drive either, but that's another matter, and it does support all my other hardware.
Actually, like many *nixes where you also encounter this problem, you can put the drivers on a CD, USB drive, Network Boot Share, etc... PS This would not be an issue for WindowsXP except it was released in 2001, that predates pretty much ALL SATA devices. Get it?