Apple MacBook Pro 'Fastest Windows XP Notebook'?

rgraham writes "The Register has a great opening line in a recent article, "Want the fastest Windows XP Core Duo notebook? Then buy a Mac. According to benchmarks carried out by website GearLog, Apple's MacBook Pro running Windows XP is a better Adobe Photoshop rig than any other Core Duo laptop on the market." GearLog ran the same tests that were run by PC Magazine with the Mac coming out on top."

Comments

Best tool for the job

[networkBoy]

Now all I want to know is which is faster: Photoshop on XP or OSX?
-nB

Re:Best tool for the job

[cei]

We'll have to wait for Adobe to code a Universal Binary build of Photoshop before any real comparisons can be made.

Re:Best tool for the job

[DiscoFreq]

Yes, finally it's possible to compare that (speed of Windows vs OSX) on the same machine!

Re:Best tool for the job

[wiggles]

Better yet, with the same processor and memory, why is one computer significantly faster than the other? This makes me wonder if Apple and Adobe have some sort of back room deal to slow down Adobe apps on non-Apple hardware.
*dons tinfoil hat*

Re:Best tool for the job

[fak3r]

Ah, now that will be interesting; not that I'm a Photoshop guy, but I've long argued that OS X is a HEAVY OS. I know it's not a fair comparision, but Ubuntu is MUCH faster (even running Gnome) on my 800Mhz iBook than OS X. While I never plan on installing Windows on a new Mac (I am waiting to see what they come out with to replace the iBook) I will dual boot OS X and Linux first thing. Anyone who has run Linux, with Mac-on-linux at the same time will know what I mean.

Re:Best tool for the job

[kannibal_klown]

Not really. As others posted before you, Adobe still doesn't have the Intel version (or should I say "Universal version" of the binaries). So OS X would be running it under Rosetta, which slows things down big time.

Re:Best tool for the job

[TheRaven64]

Some parts of OS X are much slower than others. System calls are quite expensive (roughly 10x the cost on a conventional UNIX system), for example. The slowest part of the system I have found is the VM subsystem, which absolutely crawls. I wrote some fairly I/O intensive code with a number of back ends. The aio back end is about half the speed on OS X as on FreeBSD on similar hardware. The mmap backend is an order of magnitude slower on OS X than the aio back end, while they are both about the same speed on FreeBSD. This means that anything that causes page faults is going to slow the system down to a painful speed, which is why Mac users always recommend that you buy a lot of RAM.

Re:Best tool for the job

[bunratty]

Differences in cache size, cache speed, disk access time, and disk throughput, among other things, would cause two computers with exactly the same CPU, RAM, and bus to run at different speeds. This is part of the MHz myth -- there's more to how fast a computer is than the speed of its individual parts.

Re:Best tool for the job

[noewun]

FWIW, Ubunto is slower on my Powerbook than 10.4.5. Could be due to the age of the hardware, tho. It's a six year old laptop.

Re:Best tool for the job

[CastrTroy]

You couldn't test adobe, but you could test some other piece of software. Maybe apache. See which OS can handle the most requests.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Jeffrey Baker]

Really? I have quite the opposite experience. While Ubuntu takes all week to boot, once it's running it feels faster than OS X. Scrolling a web page, for example, seems faster, and I can play larger and more complex videos using VideoLAN under Ubuntu than I can under OS X.

Nevertheless, I still triple-boot that system: Ubuntu for almost everything, OS X when I want to use iTunes, QuickTime, etc, and Mac OS 9 for old games.

Re:Best tool for the job

[noewun]

Like I said, could be the hardware. It's a Pismo, so it has an ATI Rage 128 Mobility with AGP 2x. According to a friend who's much more Linux savvy than am I, Linux direct rendering support sucks for this card, whereas 10.4.5 has no problems with it. Safari flies under Tiger, but Firefox is a bit slow under Ubuntu.

Re:Best tool for the job

[TgmBxA!X8(TNDWr_, xv]

To be fair, Firefox on any platform is "a bit slow," if you get my drift.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Jeffrey Baker]

Mine is a Pismo, too, but I should have mentioned that I'm running Ubuntu Dapper, which has some newer bits of X.org than the previous release has. It's very snappy these days.

Re:Best tool for the job

[noewun]

Ah. Any browser suggestions for a Linux n00b?

Re:Best tool for the job

[Blisshead]

True. then you have something to compare price/performance points with.

Re:Best tool for the job

[fak3r]

Try Galeon and Opera.

Re:Best tool for the job

[noewun]

Stable?

Re:Best tool for the job

[ivoras]

This is actually a nice indication of a (now not so) subtle shift in the industry. Ten years ago a company that produced a unix-like OS with so much lag in a core system would be loughed down and burn. Now, people don't even notice (for the most part). You can make a system with wicked clever algorithms, and still it wouldn't matter because what people are drawn to are pretty colors of the hardware and the UI.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Anonymous Coward]

> The aio back end is about half the speed on OS X as on FreeBSD on similar hardware.

Last time I checked, OS X didn't fully support aio to the point that after about 16 I/Os it stopped responding. Certainly the aio headers are not in the standard locale on OS X.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Allnighterking]

If speed where the only contention .... then MacOSX does win but not by a lot. However if quality of rendering, Usability when dealing with large file sizes (100's of MB range) etc etc etc come into play then Mac has and still does blow Windows away in this area. That is why if you head into any graphics studio (not web shop they really are different) doing graphics for print media, or doing what used to be called offset layout, you will find Mac leading the way. It really is that much better.

Re:Best tool for the job

[pammon]

Some parts of OS X are much slower than others. System calls are quite expensive (roughly 10x the cost on a conventional UNIX system), for example

I'm not disputing this, but I'd like to provide some context so people aren't left with the impression that "Apple's programmers are st00pid n00bs." There's at least three decisions that negatively impact OS X's system call performance, but that provide wins in other areas.

1) Mach/FreeBSD system call disambiguation. OS X has to support both Mach and FreeBSD system calls through the same trap interface. Determining which you have isn't cheap, but the win is apparent - how many Mach messages per second does your conventional UNIX benchmark at? Features don't come for free. This is fixed overhead which will be especially apparent with "fast" system calls.

2) 4/4 memory split. A system call requires a context switch to and from the kernel's own address space. I'm not sure about other UNIX flavors, but Linux in particular (usually) maps the kernel's address space into each process with a 3/1 split, which is faster but has an obvious downside - 25% less address space for the process and 75% less for the kernel!

3) Dynamic library binding. OS X is unusual in that every library is always dynamically bound, which adds overhead for every call, but gives you all the benefits of non-static libraries (code sharing, security, etc.) Benchmarks often don't take this into account.

The slowest part of the system I have found is the VM subsystem, which absolutely crawls. I wrote some fairly I/O intensive code with a number of back ends.

There's a few things I've found that impact OS X's I/O negatively:

1) Spotlight wants to index any file you opened for writing and then closed. That's obviously going to incur a cost.

2) Unified buffer cache - cacheing reads in the VM system. For a linear read of a huge file, this only hurts; it can be turned off on a per descriptor basis, but code compiled naively for OS X won't have bothered to do that.

3) Bugs. There seems to be a bug where a program doing linear I/O can monopolize the I/O system, which improves performance for that process but decreases apparent responsiveness.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Kadin2048]

True; tests of the OS for server-type tasks have already been done, at least on the PPC side -- people have compared database performance on the Apple XServe when running OS X Server versus Linux, with the same pieces of software and (I think) the same test data, the only thing that was changed between the two was the OS. Result was ... Linux wins, although I've never heard a really conclusive explanation as to why. It apparently has something to do with process scheduling, I've heard.

I suppose you could do the same thing with Apache or MySQL on a Mactel, in order to compare OS X versus Windows, but I'm not sure how useful or interesting a comparison it would be, since those machines (consumer laptops) aren't really used for those kinds of tasks very often.

Frankly I think the best measures of desktop performance are ones having to do with UI latency: I don't care how fast a system crunches numbers, if I have to use it and it takes more than a tenth of a second for it to register that I've pressed the mouse button, it's too slow. Program launch times, UI latency, window scrolling and resizing ... these are all far more important to real desktop users than how many simultaneous threads it can handle in Apache, or how many queries it can process in a MySQL DB.

Re:Best tool for the job

[l3prador]

But why would Apple make a deal for the Windows version of Adobe's software to run faster on Apple's hardware? I feel like Apple would be much more interested in, say, a Universal Binary version of Photoshop that ran faster (or just the existence of a Universal Binary at all).

Re:Best tool for the job

[Breakfast Pants]

Is there a similar switch to turn off VM caching on a per descriptor basis in linux? Right now I have an ugly script for some things which sets "swapiness" to a very low value, does all of the job (right now I just use this for updatedb), and then sets swapiness back. If I code could do this on a descriptor level that would rock (think extracting a large tar, etc.).

Re:Best tool for the job

[communikatsiglobale]

Gentlemen, Wa wa wa wa wa, wa wa wa OSX wa! Wa wa, wa wa wa XP. Wa wa wa wa wa wa wa. Wa wa wa wa, wa wa wa wa! Wa wa OSX wa XP wa wa wa? Wa! Wa wa wa wa wa wa. Wa wa wa wa wa wa wa, wa: 1 Wa wa wa wa wa wa wa. 2 Wa wa XP wa wa wa. Wa wa wa wa wa? 3 Wa wa wa wa wa wa? Wa. Wa wa, 4 Wa wa wa wa? IMHO wa wa wa wa wa OSX wa wa wa wa wa. Wa wa? Wa wa wa wa wa wa XP, wa wa wa wa wa wa wa, wa wa wa wa.

Re:Best tool for the job

[megabeck42]

1, How is supporting Mach and FreeBSD system calls an advantage? Apps should not be making direct system calls and instead invoke the appropriate c library wrapper. This doesn't seem like a feature, it sounds like a bad design decision. What was the reasoning by basing OSX on Mach in the first place? What is the justification for this excessive, per system call overhead?

How many Mach messages per second does my conventional UNIX benchmark at? None. It can't. Does this preclude me from doing anything I need to do? No.

2, The 4/4 memory split only applies to 32 bit environments. Haven't the G3/G4/G5 been 64 bit? I know the current Core Duo's are 32 bit, but the next generation are supposed to support AMD's x86-64 (called EM64T in Intel language.). There's no advantage to seperate virtual address spaces when you have 64 bit architectures. Even on 32bit architectures, a 2/2 or 3/1 split is only a problem if you have more than two or three gigabytes of physical ram or if your application wants to memory map more than two or three gigs of virtual address space. If you need to do that, then get an architecture that supports it. Most people still have less than 2 gigs of ram in their computers, why optimize for those that do when the computers people will be buying when four gigs of ram or more is common will already be 64 bit.

3, Are you suggesting that FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or any other modern operating system doesn't use dynamic libraries? What is so special about OSX's dynamic loader that Benchmarks need to take it into account?

1, Agreed.

2, What? Please. Yes, there is an advantage to not using the buffer cache in some cases, something you can do in linux with the O_DIRECT filedescriptor flag, but in most cases, it's not worth the trouble. Bypassing the buffer cache spares you the cost of a copy, but if you ever need the block again, you are at a clear advantage if it could have been read out of the buffer cache.

3. Don't know anything about it, but it's quite possible.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Jozer99]

I was under the impression that OS X used a BSD kernel (Darwin). Why then are some basic functions so slow when compaired to a normal BSD distro?

Re:Best tool for the job

[Anonymous Coward]

The grand technical reason Mach is the basis of OS X is that it was the basis of NEXTSTEP. It permitted the early Rhapsody and later XNU take the existing NEXTSTEP codebase and modernize it piece by piece from other BSD projects, while not disrupting WebObjects and OPENSTEP. A less than wonderous plan, really, since the design of XNU basically reduces the meaningful usefulness of Mach's SMP support. Because the BSD parts of the kernel weren't thread-safe, they still end up performing the same locking work as the other BSD projects. They also get to spend time and money making Mach's design less of a performance hurdle. All in all, it would have been easier to just add Mach IPC and Mach-O binary support to FreeBSD. At the end of the day, though, buying NeXT and then scrapping many of its technical assets might have made investors ask why they bothered acquiring NeXT anyway.

Re:Best tool for the job

[azuretek]

He just told you, alot of their problems stem from compatability, they wrote the original code for a certain platform but it needs to be versatile and run on many now. Hacks in the code are what drives down performance, OS X is to look pretty and it's plenty responsive for me. I like having a good looking and easy to use desktop while still being able to have a shell and development environment, if it means I have to live with a slight slowdown compared to other operating systems then so be it.

Really the only way to fix the problem is to rewrite, and probably remove compatability with older technology, Windows does it all the time.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Jozer99]

I'm not asking if you can live with it, just why it exists. Plus, from the benchmarks I have seen, the slow memory access commands also exist on the PowerPC versions of OS X, they are just not quite as bad.

Re:Best tool for the job

[rsborg]

You can make a system with wicked clever algorithms, and still it wouldn't matter because what people are drawn to are pretty colors of the hardware and the UI.

Isn't it a bit deceptive to label "Good UI" as "pretty colors"? It's been proven that the OSX UI guidelines, look and feel, is MUCH better than both Windows and especially Linux.

It doesn't matter a damn that a computer or program is 50% faster, as most of the time the process waits on user input... it's making the users more productive and happy that really makes a computer/program solution *faster*... if that means "pretty colors" or "good UI guidelines" or "system stability" makes this possible, then those should really be what matters in benchmarking.

Re:Best tool for the job

[pfingst]

Never any mod points around when I need them. Fantastic post!

Pfingst

Re:Best tool for the job

[pammon]

How is supporting Mach and FreeBSD system calls an advantage?

There's a lot of historical decisions of dubious validity in retrospect, but there's also an excellent technical defense that can be made for Mach. In short, Mach is really cool. Mach IPC makes signals, sockets, pipes, shared memory, SysV IPC, etc. look positively clumsy. What's FreeBSD's answer to the Mach Inteface Generator? CORBA?

So OS X gets a lot of mileage out of Mach messaging - AppleEvents, distributed notifications, run loops, etc. If OS X processes seem good at talking to one another - think VoiceOver, Spotlight, the window server, iLife's media sharing, even copy and paste - it's due in part to the fast, flexible IPC mechanisms enabled by Mach.

The 4/4 memory split only applies to 32 bit environments. Haven't the G3/G4/G5 been 64 bit?

In principle, yes; in practice, OS X has a 32 bit kernel even on 64 bit machines, not least of all for driver binary compatibility. You want to know the win here - take a look at the binary compatibility driver story on 64 bit Linux or 64 bit Windows. Apple allows 64 bit processes on Tiger without breaking everyone's hardware.

(Incidentally, only the G5 is 64 bit.)

Are you suggesting that FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or any other modern operating system doesn't use dynamic libraries?

Yes. Benchmarks typically compare statically linked libraries on Linux (because they're faster) to dynamically linked binaries on OS X (because that's all Apple ships).

Yes, there is an advantage to not using the buffer cache in some cases, something you can do in linux with the O_DIRECT filedescriptor flag

Thanks, I wasn't familiar with that flag on Linux. From googling, it looks like it does somewhat different things, in particular, not speeding up sequential file access.

In any case, I'll certainly agree that there Linux-specific filesystem optimizations; I was just commenting on a technique I found to give a substantial boost to OS X programs with sequential access patterns.

Re:Best tool for the job

[localman]

It's not pretty colors, it's total utility. That rarely correlates with raw speed or cleverness of the algorithm. My guess is that most slow bits in the system were conscious choices where the benefits outweighed the costs. I'm sure there's a thousand things they could improve, still, but overall it's the most productive system I've worked on.

And don't hate it just because it's beautiful :)

Cheers.

Re:Best tool for the job

[lewp]

There's no advantage to seperate virtual address spaces when you have 64 bit architectures. Even on 32bit architectures, a 2/2 or 3/1 split is only a problem if you have more than two or three gigabytes of physical ram or if your application wants to memory map more than two or three gigs of virtual address space. If you need to do that, then get an architecture that supports it. Most people still have less than 2 gigs of ram in their computers, why optimize for those that do when the computers people will be buying when four gigs of ram or more is common will already be 64 bit.

I'm not disputing that Apple might have gone the wrong way with this particular decision (I honestly don't know enough about the implications to argue either way), but you have to remember Apple's rather huge presence in the creative community, and growing presence in the scientific community.

In the cases where you assume people need to get another architecture, consider that maybe Apple wants to be that architecture. Though the majority of customers buying Apple's computers do indeed use them -- I'm sure -- with less than 2GB of RAM, I'd be willing to bet that given their relatively small presence in the overall desktop and workstation market and their relatively large presence in the two demanding groups of users named above that they have significantly more than their "fair share" of users with large amounts of RAM.

Now, maybe their decisions cause some performance loss for the majority of their users, while significantly enhancing the experiences of some of their most loyal and demanding (not to mention profitable) users. As long as Safari loads quickly and Taco can play his beloved WoW, you'll likely not hear too many complaints. If that's the case, maybe their bad design decisions aren't so bad after all.

Just a thought.

Re:Best tool for the job

[WinstonSmith68]

What is most interesting is the fact that the apple and the acer were the same price. The acer did come with more ram and a slightly bigger harddrive, but was otherwise identical. Assuming you upgraded the drive for $100.00 and bought a 1 gig stick of ram for another $100.00 you are still within $200.00 of the Acer. Thus, it seems to me that the Apple premium is about $100.00. The question now is: Is a computer that will soon be capable of triple booting, running the superior Mac OS X, and having the best form factors in the industry worth $200.00?

Re:Best tool for the job

[TheRaven64]

It all goes back to Mach. In Mach, all IPC is does by sending messages to ports. This is a really nice abstraction, and all kernels should be designed this way. Where Mach fell down was that it focussed on security. Every Mach port had rights associated with it, and sending a message to a port required that the sender's port rights be checked by the kernel. It turns out, 99%+ of the time, you don't actually care about this, and all it does is slow messages down (90% of the cost of sending a Mach message is the cost of checking the port rights). A better design would be for the kernel to simply prepend the sender's PID to the message, and allow the receiver to check the rights if it cared.

When it comes to the VM subsystem, every page fault requires a small flurry of Mach messages to be exchanged, each of which has this cost.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Jozer99]

Thank you for the explanation. Now another question, why don't they change it? Obviously, other BSD distros have it fixed, and swapping kernels might not be too terrible.

Re:Best tool for the job

[IntlHarvester]

Mach is really cool. Mach IPC makes signals, sockets, pipes, shared memory, SysV IPC, etc. look positively clumsy

This is interesting, but I strongly suspect that Mach won for OSX primarily due to time-to-market and legacy considerations. If they were to "do it from scratch", would anyone use Mach?

Apple allows 64 bit processes on Tiger without breaking everyone's hardware.

Hey -- that was the great thing about Windows 95 too! Well, not really.

Given the history of "thunking layers" and the horrendus 16/32-bit endless migration on the PC side, I can understand why Microsoft in particular went right to 64-bit native.

(Although I heard that Apple uses a special PPC mode to support 64-bit on G5 chips, so I'm not sure if Tiger will have any 64-bit support when 'Woodcrest' or whatever ships in six months.)

Re:Best tool for the job

[IntlHarvester]

Other BSD distros never used Mach and never had this problem. (Of course, they never had a software stack like OpenStep either.)

At this point, everything else on the OS depends on Mach, which makes it expensive to "switch kernels". And since 90% of Apple sales are consumer desktops where I/O isn't that important, it's probably just not worth it.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Fex303]

The question now is: Is a computer that will soon be capable of triple booting, running the superior Mac OS X, and having the best form factors in the industry worth $200.00?

I'd pay $300.00 extra for an extra mouse button as well...

Re:Best tool for the job

[larry bagina]

This is interesting, but I strongly suspect that Mach won for OSX primarily due to time-to-market and legacy considerations. If they were to "do it from scratch", would anyone use Mach?

Considering that 1) GNU HURD is based on Mach and 2) GNU HURD was started in 1990, both your points are wrong :)

Re:Best tool for the job

[Jeffrey Baker]

Reasonably stable. Ubuntu is 2 months and 1 week away from a release they plan to support for 5 years. I haven't had any real problems with it, just transient uninstallable packages.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Kalak]

time to market is probably correct, as OS X is a continuation of NextStep, not a write from scratch. Now NextStep chose Mach for different reasons than time to market I suspect, but in speaking strictly of OSX you have to remember its original origins (part of the reasson Intel compatability is a simple issue for the OS, since the dual life is quite historical for NextStep).

Re:Best tool for the job

[Halo1]

man fcntl -> F_NOCACHE

Re:Best tool for the job

[fnord_uk]

Yep. I've been running the Flight 5 release for a couple of weeks with regular updating, and it is all going nicely.

I was keen to get 2.6.15 kernel so switching early to Dapper has been a good choice for me.

The only gripe for me has been buggy support for my Griffin iMic in ALSA.

Re:Best tool for the job

[ivoras]

It's too late to whine now but I didn't mean the "pretty colors" bit literally - of course the overall consitency of look and feel is just as important, if not more. People would be acting dumb if they bought a computer as an art piece :)

Re:Best tool for the job

[TheRaven64]

It's a good question. NetBSD, for example, has a Mach compatibility layer which provides Mach IPC for the services that need it (and quite a few things in OS X do use it, because it's very nice when you are not performance constrained), and regular UNIX IPC for everything else. I would imagine the main thing keeping Apple with XNU is IOKit, which is a device driver framework written in embedded C++. Maybe if someone ported that to NetBSD, they would switch...

Re:Best tool for the job

[Breakfast Pants]

I don't see that in man fcntl on my linux system, and while this isn't the best search it is telling.

Re:Best tool for the job

[Halo1]

I apologise, I missed the "Linux" in your post. My answer was for Mac OS X. I can't find a similar parameter on the Linux fcntl man page either.

The closest I can find is to mmap the file and to use madvise afterwards to indicate how you will use it (like MADV_DONTNEED)

Re:Best tool for the job

[Lally Singh]

On the mac side, the UI is mostly drag & drop instead of context-menu heavy as in Linux & Windows. I don't miss the second button (much). Not perfect, but not nearly as bad as people switching in from Linux & windows would believe.

AMD

[Eightyford]

It would be nice if they tested AMD notebooks.

Re:AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD doesn't have anything that competes with this.

Intel wins battery life, hands down, also.

Re:AMD

[hawkbug]

Yeah, you're right. I only build AMD systems because they run cooler, faster, etc, etc - when compared to the Pentium 4 that is. With this new Intel CPU, things have changed. AMD needs to respond quickly with a good dual core notebook product. Unfortunately, they still haven't mastered the 65 nm process yet - so it will be a while. My question is, is the CoreDuo 64 bit? If not, it seems rather stupid to buy one of these right now.

Re:AMD

[ditoa]

Core Duo has EM64T (Intel's version of AMD64) support. So your answer is yes.

Re:AMD

[jonnythan]

AMD doesn't make any dual-core notebook chips...

Re:AMD

[ditoa]

Shit actually looks like I am wrong, I was thinking of Merom, the successor to Yonah (which are the current chips).

Re:AMD

[IronTek]

AMD will release their Turion64 X2 dual core processor pretty soon. But I am impressed with the Intel CoreDuo. It does not seem to be (and is not) the POS that their first "dual core" processor was.

Re:AMD

[teg]

My question is, is the CoreDuo 64 bit?

No, it isn't. However, for most users, those extra bits are rather pointless - the notebook will run programs just as well as todays 64 bit processors for the lifetime of the laptop.

I'd love a 64 bit notebook, for binary compatibility with 64 bit servers.... however, for almost everyone, that is irrelevant. And while I want 64 bit, I don't think I'd do the sacrifice in other areas and get an AMD-based laptop - the surrounding technologies and the chip itself just aren't as good for laptops. Wireless is likely to be a pain, too: Intel's centrino chips work well, just download the firmware and they're up in e.g. Fedora - not the latest one yet, I guess, but the track record is a good one.

Re:AMD

[hattig]

Current Core Duo (Yonah) is 32-bits only.

AMD will be releasing 25W Dual-Core Turions in May, running with DDR2 memory (which will save a few Watts over DDR memory).

Yonah is 31W (TDP, actual power consumption is lower. Same goes for AMD of course.). AMD includes half of a northbridge on their processor as well.

Of course, AMD's 25W Turion X2s only come in 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz variants. The 2.0GHz and 2.2GHz versions are 35W, but still comparable in power consumption to Yonah. The interesting thing is that this is at 90nm. If AMD has any of the hi-speed, low-power-consumption features of IBM's 65mn process, then next year could be very interesting however.

Doesn't negate the fact that Intel was there first, nor that AMD isn't overtaking them but merely having a competitive offering in the mobile arena.

Re:AMD

[loony]

Not really - AMD doesn't have dual core laptops out yet and even if you look at just one core, the Intel Core architecture beats anything AMD has right now hands down...

Peter.

Re:AMD

[Eightyford]

AMD doesn't make any dual-core notebook chips...

That doesn't make comparisons impossible. Who cares how many cores there is. People want speed.

Re:AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I order one again?

Re:AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

My notebook (sager 9750) has a dual-core AMD chip in it. Granted, the dual core athlon 64 is intended for desktop use, but still...

Re:AMD

[mOOzilla]

Insightful??? More cores give you SPEED by CONCURANCY! WTF!??

Re:AMD

[Eightyford]

Insightful??? More cores give you SPEED by CONCURANCY! WTF!??

Easy. Killer. You can still test the applications, games, and benchmark programs. I would like to see how amd's offerings compare. If you would have read the article you would have saw that they tested the pentium M. Now go bitch about something else.

Re:AMD

[mOOzilla]

Well you complained about speed you ninney and said that dual core means nothing to speed, it sure does via concurrency. Parallelism == concurrency == 2x as much done as a single core (if well designed) == SPEED which YOU whinged about. DUH. Now go bitch about something else.

Re:AMD

[tehcrazybob]

Actually, he didn't say that dual cores don't affect speed. He very clearly said that people don't care how many cores there are, and that people only want speed. It's entirely possible that a dual-core processor would be faster than a single, but most people don't actually care how the thing works, and they will go for what feels fastest regardless to the number of cores.

Re:AMD

[mOOzilla]

*pant pant* Must type reply *pant pant* Damn, cant think of anything. Ill call you a TARD instead :)

Re:AMD

[kyouteki]

Core Duo does -NOT- have EM64T support. It's successor core will, but the Yonah does not.

Re:AMD

[dr.badass]

That doesn't make comparisons impossible. Who cares how many cores there is. People want speed.

In a mulithreaded speed test, a single-core processor is much like a one-legged man at an asskicking contest. While a comparison is not impossible, it is more or less a waste of time. Even the slight (slight over Core Duo, that is) architectural superiority that AMD has would not make a significant difference.

Re:AMD

[Listen Up]

Your wording is misleading...

AMD might not sell dual-core chips specifically for laptops, but you *can* buy a dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 or FX in an Alienware Aurora m7700 laptop, for example, without a problem starting at ~$2600.

Re:AMD

[Panaflex]

Here here! It's because they actually have two cores - not just wired up a couple of chips in the same package! Ohh, and having a decent cache management that actually caches instead of just misses all the time certainly helps too!

fastest in one test

[gEvil (beta)]

Fastest WinXP notebook for the Photoshop test. It doesn't look like it fared so well in the Windows Media encode test.

Re:fastest in one test

[MustardMan]

Am I the only one who feels a little dirty reading about encoding windows media on windows xp running on apple hardware? It just feels so wrong.

Re:fastest in one test

[Midnight Thunder]

Fastest WinXP notebook for the Photoshop test. It doesn't look like it fared so well in the Windows Media encode test.

I would be curious to know what aspects caused the slow down. Maybe the lack of a properly supported (by the OS, as opposed to Microsoft) graphics card.

Re:fastest in one test

[ZachPruckowski]

Well, it didn't have a working video card. It was a slightly (.16 GHz) faster processor, but didn't have a working video card driver. So anything that would have otherwise been put on the graphics card processor landed on the CPU

Re:fastest in one test

[gEvil (beta)]

Does the Windows Media Encoder now offload part of the task to the graphics card? I know that the WMV9 renderer can take advantage of a GPU during playback, but I don't know if it can for encoding.

Re:fastest in one test

[drinkypoo]

The graphics card isn't involved in media encoding. Well, there ARE schemes that involve it, but it's not normal. Of course, if they were actually displaying the clip while they encoded it, that could possibly do it - but that's a silly thing to do unless you're doing a very short clip and you want to see what the compression artifacting looks like as-you-go.

Re:fastest in one test

[gEvil (beta)]

And please tell us what portions of the video encoding task are handled by the GPU.

Re:fastest in one test

[timeOday]

I was disappointed when I saw it was a one-application benchmark, and moreso that it's Photoshop. For years I tried to determine how fast Macs really were, and all I could find were Photoshop benchmarks... a program which I have never used.

Anyways, now that Macs and PCs are the same hardware, running a hardware comparo test seems pointless to me. CPU-bound apps will be the same on both, other than when one manufacturer gets the jump on another in shipping the latest Intel processor or third party graphics card.

Benchmarking OSX against Windows XP and Linux will be easier now, due to the common hardware platform. But personally I think OS decisions hardly ever swing on raw performance; it's all about integration, software compatibility, features, in-house expertise, and price.

Re:fastest in one test

[Anonymous Coward]

But why?

Re:fastest in one test

[Llywelyn]

If the GPU is used for *anything* on one system and not on the other, then it means that the processor has to do things on one that it doesn't have to do on the other. One processor would be `busier' than the other one.

Video encoding is not done in isolation (i.e., the OS is running), so it could affect the results even if nothing in video encoding is being bounced through the GPU.

Re:fastest in one test

[Anonymous Coward]

The effect would be marginal, unless you're trying to play Quake 2 in a window with software rendering enabled. Presumeably they left the machine alone while it did its thing during the test.

Re:fastest in one test

[pomo monster]

"Troll"? How can the truth be considered "troll"? Any mods care to explain?

Re:fastest in one test

[rob_squared]

Well, creating .asf or .wmv files would make anyone want to shower repeatedly.

I'm just waiting for the .asf/.wmv support groups* to start popping up.

And please mods, realize that suggesting a support group for a file format is indeed a joke.

Re:fastest in one test

[megabeck42]

You wouldn't need to display the clip while encoding it to take advantage of the graphics card. The whole gpgpu system, general purpose graphics processing, uses off screen rendering targets such as the OpenGL pixel buffer object or frame buffer object. It would be straightforward, with an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card, to offload the colorspace transforms, fast/discrete fourier transforms, and a few other compute intensive algorithms.

But, you are right when you said its not normal. Hopefully, as OpenGL 2.0 becomes more ubiquitous, we'll see more useful offloading.

Re:fastest in one test

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who feels a little dirty reading about encoding windows media on windows xp running on apple hardware? It just feels so wrong.

No, it me makes feel all dirty too. Dirty, dirty, dirty, just the way I love it!

This is weird...

[__aaclcg7560]

Why did it had to be Microsoft confirming that Steve Jobs was correct that the Intel Mac was a lot faster than the PPC Mac?

Re:This is weird...

[Firehed]

What would MS have had to do with anything? Intel, perhaps, but what processors Macs are using is hardly relavent to the goings-on of Microsoft. Consider:

"Your decision to use Intel's chips instead of PowerPC chips was a wise one" - MS
"Your decision to use our chips instead of PowerPC chips was a wise one" - Intel

Microsoft is indifferent to Apple's architecture - MS has always coded for x86 chips, and most likely always will (you know, computer-always, meaning till that big thing that's so big it shouldn't be bogged down by needing backwards compatibility, most likely quantum chips). Intel, OTOH, is now doing more business.

Logically, why would an opposing software vendor care about a hardware change? I'd much more expect something from AMD saying that 'x86 is faster than PPC, but our x86 is faster than Intel's so switch to our chips'.

Re:This is weird...

[soft_guy]

"Your decision to use Intel's chips instead of PowerPC chips was a wise one" - MS

"Your decision to use our chips instead of PowerPC chips was a wise one" - Intel

"Don't the door hit you on the way out" - IBM

Re:This is weird...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't [let] the door hit you on the way out" - IBM

Nah, IBM was more, "What? You're leaving? Oh. Um... Weren't we supposed to be selling CPU chips to you? I mean, the leftovers after we had filled our important customer's orders? I swear we could remember saying we'd promised you nice fast chips... They're almost ready! "

Re:This is weird...

[j.bellone]

The very hot thing was that Microsoft pulled dual core 3.2GHZ PowerPC chips out of them for the 360. Nice.

Re:This is weird...

[drsmithy]

Microsoft is indifferent to Apple's architecture - MS has always coded for x86 chips, and most likely always will [...]

Yeah, except for all the software they wrote for x86-64, Itanium, PPC, Alpha, MIPS, Moto 68k...

Re:This is weird...

[Firehed]

I was rather referring to the desktop/home user segment within the last 15 years or so (you know, the computers that are relavent to the story). And x86-64 is just an extension of x86 that lets you use more memory, it's not really a different architecture. More complex, perhaps, but not a full rewrite.

Re:This is weird...

[drsmithy]

I was rather referring to the desktop/home user segment within the last 15 years or so (you know, the computers that are relavent to the story).

Right, so just x86, PPC and 68k.

And x86-64 is just an extension of x86 that lets you use more memory, it's not really a different architecture. More complex, perhaps, but not a full rewrite.

When you're talking about low level OS code, I suspect it's fairly different.

Re:This is weird...

[Firehed]

Are you going out of your way to make an argument? Honestly... 99% of what Microsoft ships to home users is x86 code, and the remaining 1% is x86-64 with crap driver support. Why else would we have waited for Intel chips in Apple computers to load up XP? I think the lack of current PPC operating systems of the Windows XP variety from Microsoft might have played at least a minor role.

Fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Want the fastest Windows XP Core Duo notebook at Photoshop?"

Fixed it for you.

Bah! Plugins are not a real benchmark...

[tpgp]

Fastest at running certain photoshop plugins :-/

Still - yet another reason to not dismiss windows-on-mac-hardware efforts.

Re:Bah! Plugins are not a real benchmark...

[truthsearch]

yet another reason to not dismiss windows-on-mac-hardware efforts.

Has anyone confirmed the process is not against the Microsoft Windows EULA? If it's not in there today I can image a new paragraph in the near future.

Re:Bah! Plugins are not a real benchmark...

[nsayer]

"If it's not in there today I can image a new paragraph in the near future."

Why would Microsoft care? They would be happy to find a new group of would-be customers going out to the store to buy a copy of Windows. The installation procedure is probably not supported, but that doesn't make it "illegal."

Re:Bah! Plugins are not a real benchmark...

[eMartin]

Why?

Microsoft doesn't make computers. They sell Windows.

They have nothing to lose on this.

Re:Bah! Plugins are not a real benchmark...

[truthsearch]

Microsoft has a long history of manipulating hardware manufacturers. They effectively control what Dell and others put in their computers. They are control freaks and will not be satisfied with a manufacturer they can't influence, such as Apple.

Re:Bah! Plugins are not a real benchmark...

[drsmithy]

Has anyone confirmed the process is not against the Microsoft Windows EULA?

Of course it's not. That's the kind of thing Apple does.

If it's not in there today I can image a new paragraph in the near future.

For what possible reason ?

Re:Bah! Plugins are not a real benchmark...

[drsmithy]

Microsoft has a long history of manipulating hardware manufacturers. They effectively control what Dell and others put in their computers. They are control freaks and will not be satisfied with a manufacturer they can't influence, such as Apple.

Right, that must be why they don't sell a version of Windows to the general public, because then people would be able to install it onto any hardware they want.

Oh, wait, they *do*. It's *Apple* who tell you what machines you can and can't install their OS on.

Find out next year

[Midnight Thunder]

Now all I want to know is which is faster: Photoshop on XP or OSX?

That will have to wait until next year, sine Adobe has stated that the Intel version of Photoshop for MacOS X won't be available until next year.

Re:Find out next year

[man2525]

Adobe does not want to make a MacIntel version of Photoshop CS2. They want to release Photoshop CS3 as a Universal Binary. They are trying hard to have a release by the end of this year, but they need to move their development environment from Metrowerks Code Warrior to Apple XCode.

Re:Find out next year

[consonant]

Hm. I was thinking of the year-long wait too, but only because Photoshop takes frickin' ages to open...

Re:Find out next year

[ceoyoyo]

It probably doesn't help much that Photoshop is Carbon either. Not to mention they've got lots of Altivec code.

Re:Find out next year

[gnasher719]

'' It probably doesn't help much that Photoshop is Carbon either. Not to mention they've got lots of Altivec code. ''

Carbon doesn't hurt either. Carbon works just as fine on Intel Macs as it does on PowerPC Macs.

And Altivec code doesn't hurt either. Whatever Altivec code Adobe has, they should have SSE2 or SSE3 code for Pentium doing exactly the same things. This is not their first x86 version of Photoshop, you know.

Re:Find out next year

[ceoyoyo]

Does Carbon port as well as Cocoa? I know it runs fine, but I had the impression Carbon allowed a little more leeway in how you did things... leeway that wouldn't necessarily port quite correctly.

I wonder if Adobe was quite as fanatical about doing SSE optimizations on their code on Intel as they were with Altivec on PPC. As others point out, Apple always used them as a benchmark so their code was definitely optimized. I wonder if they did that to the same extent on Windows, where they got considerably less attention (though possibly more sales).

You're probably right though, copy and paste job. How come it's taking so long? ;)

Re:Find out next year

[Poltras]

Carbon doesn't work with the Intel processor. That was one of the first thing announced by Apple.

Re:Find out next year

[statusbar]

I think you are confusing carbon with 'classic'.

--jeffk++

Re:Find out next year

[ceoyoyo]

Yeah, found it: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/adoptinguniversa lbinaries.html. I knew I read that somewhere.

Apple says that Cocoa apps might need a few tweaks and a recompile. Carbon apps might need a few more tweaks, endian issues handled, and a recompile.

Re:Find out next year

[Midnight Thunder]

Apple says that Cocoa apps might need a few tweaks and a recompile. Carbon apps might need a few more tweaks, endian issues handled, and a recompile.

This where it would have been nice of the Intel chips allowed you to chooses Endianess, like the PowerPC chips do.

Re:Find out next year

[bhtooefr]

Actually, the 970 didn't allow you to choose endianness.

Re:Find out next year

[Zebra_X]

Lol, no.

His answer is, it is faster on XP ATM, because the OSX version uses Rosetta.

Re:Find out next year

[Poltras]

ooopps, my fault. back to the flaming board :P

Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[RunFatBoy.net]

Now that the Mac is showing off it's quality hardware and such, as the Intel models become commonplace, I wouldn't be surprised to see a couple of commercial offerings for dual boot between Mac and Windows.

There's an opportunity for business to finally transition to a quality hardware platform/OS, and I hope someone steps up to the plate to make a formal solution in this area (not that I don't appreciate the current hacks offered).

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[ZachPruckowski]

Why a commerical offering? I mean, there's already a freeware one. How much extra beyond a Mac and XP is a person going to pay? And all you'd really be doing is providing support to people who try it. Doesn't sound like a great business plan to me.

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[MindStalker]

Why would you pay for an ipod when you can build your own MP3 player with a altoids can and some electronics parts. Geez Doesn't sounds like a a great buisness plan to me.

Thats really not a fair comparison I know. But people will pay a premium for a preconfigured system with good support. Hell I quit building my own machines are work because I just have the time to support them, and just order from dell (work for a university grant, so dell sees us as the university which means we get top tier support)

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[mrchaotica]

Why a commerical offering? I mean, there's already a freeware one.

Because lots of people -- namely, many Windows and Mac users -- are scared of free software. They're expecting some kind of "catch" (time-expiring demos, nagware, spyware, etc.) so they stay away because it's free.

Put it in a nice, glossy box on a shelf at Best Buy and only then will they consider it. It's sad, but true (and part of the reason so many are still skeptical about Free [libre] Software).

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[Petrushka]

Put it in a nice, glossy box on a shelf at Best Buy and only then will they consider it.

They'll consider it even less, I fear -- consumers (I choose the word intentionally; personally, I am a "customer") tend to be put off by a price-tag of $2.95 for a fully-featured office suite.

On the other hand, when I put my lecture notes online in OpenDocument format (as well as PDF; TeX isn't used much in humanities), quite a lot of my students are motivated by curiosity to download the necessary software and check it out. They might never open the software again, but it's still exposure. Baby steps.

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[fritzk3]

Hell I quit building my own machines are work because I just have the time to support them

Huh?

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[Pope]

No, it's because many, many Windows and Mac users aren't geeks and most free software is command-line stuff that they wouldn't know what to do with in the first place. I seriously doubt price ever enters into it.

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[MindStalker]

don't have the time.. Sorry geez.. read between the lines.
Though technically what I mean is I don't have the time to handle hardware problems, especially the shipping of bad parts for replacements. Much easier to call Dell, as we get a repair person who comes here the next morning and fixes it on the spot.

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[drsmithy]

Because lots of people -- namely, many Windows and Mac users -- are scared of free software. They're expecting some kind of "catch" (time-expiring demos, nagware, spyware, etc.) so they stay away because it's free.

It always amuses me that the assumption made why "normal people" don't like free software is because it's free, or because it being free "scares them".

(Particularly since this is the complete opposite to what happens with just about everything else in the world that's free.)

Have y'all considered that maybe "normal people" don't like free software because it's not as good, doesn't do what/anything they need, or they simply don't know about it ?

Re:Commercial Offering for Dual Boot

[apraetor]

Would you settle for Apple shipping OS X with WINE nicely confugured?

Why photoshop?

[Locke2005]

Because photoshop is one of the few applications out there that is actually designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs by splitting up the work.

Re:Why photoshop?

[drinkypoo]

Personally I'd have gone for premiere if it is indeed multithreaded as I seem to remember. It's even more demanding, but more importantly, it will exercise more of the system and will have longer run times which will help smooth out the results.

Re:Why photoshop?

[timeOday]

Because photoshop is one of the few applications out there that is actually designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs by splitting up the work.

Mac benchmarks have always been Photoshop-centric, going back for years. (decades?) Long before Macs were dual core, anyways.

In reality, using a single application to benchmark is ridiculous. I think they do it because the Photoshop product is historically tied to the Mac, and the Mac version is always carefully optimized for it.

Re:Why photoshop?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

CAD, video encoding, video compositing, 3D rendering also can efficiently use multiple CPUs. A person using a computer for any one of those tasks is more likely than a typical photoshop user to stress their computer.

Re:Why photoshop?

[AvitarX]

worthless without the graphics card though.

Re:Why photoshop?

[drinkypoo]

Well, they're both pretty useless without full graphics drivers, although premiere is probably less so if you can save your project on one machine, and export your video files on another, kind of like the equivalent of a rendering-only machine which might not even have a head.

Re:Why photoshop?

[Pope]

It's also one of a handful that are available natively on their respective OSes.
Premiere? Nope.
DVD Studio Pro? Nope.
etc.

IBM (& PowerPC)

[Anonymous Coward]

The American engineers at Apple have built and continue to build outstanding desktops. They do not use cheap, low-performance standardized parts made by slaves in a Taiwanese factory based in mainland China. Rather, the engineers use high-performance parts specially designed for the Apple desktop. Hence, Apple management can charge a slight premium for the machine.

If Apple had stuck with the PowerPC chip, its engineers could have delivered the ultimate workstation: BSD (or Linux) on PowerPC.

Sigh. Some dreams were never meant to be.

Re:IBM (& PowerPC)

[heinousjay]

Some dreams were never meant to be.

Especially when they're nightmares for everyone else.

Re:Ummm...

[1336.5]

They were marketing the computer type ie. PowerMac, iMac, Powerbook, therein lies different system hardware configurations which are more than capable of running aforementioned software. It is the CUSOMERS discretion to add more memory.

Try understanding how computers work before flaming them.

Re:Ummm...

[MustardMan]

Ya know, I'm pretty much an apple zealot... but the biggest thing they do to piss me off is include far too little ram in their systems. I bought a powermac dual g5 that came standard with 512 megs of ram. This is supposedly a top of the line powerhorse, and I paid a price premium for it. The LEAST they could do is throw in a couple sticks of ram to get the thing up to par. Applications on an imac launched every bit as fast as those on my top end dual processor beast. After I threw an extra gig in there, the machine started really smoking - like it should have off the factory floor.

Re:How things change.

[cmoney]

That's probably close to a decade ago now! Wow, how things change in 10 years!

Re:How things change.

[ccollao]

That's not completely accurate. The fisrt company into make USB massive was apple. Regarding PCI, several years ago they introduced it into their PPC market. Gee, even Sun did (altough, PCI was slower than other buses but just plain cheaper).

The other Technologies before mentined, AGP, PMT, SMP Protected memory never said so. About intel, well different story, but with your comment you are just trolling (me thinks).

Re:How things change.

[the_humeister]

Because Apple still decides to call their machines "Macintosh"? They could call it "Red Delicious", but it just doesn't have the same ring to it.

hmm is it released now

[petermgreen]

the patch for running xp on the mac that is?

Re:hmm is it released now

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go:

http://onmac.net/

Re:hmm is it released now

[jinushaun]

Here is the official Windows XP on Mac website: http://onmac.net/

The patch is available here: http://download.onmac.net/

Re:hmm is it released now

[sacrilicious]

Check out Q. It allows running Windows while running OS X (unlike the dual boot onmac.net approach).

Macbooks are also the most expensive

[Enrique1218]

I have been shopping around for a notebook for a family member. I found that Lenovo and Apple have the highest price dual core. Dell is of course the lowest. But looking at the specs, the lower price ones tend to have GMA or ATI Hypermemory GPU, slower memory, and are pretty bulky. Apple does put in the best stuff available at the launch. I would even venture to guess that the Macbooks are gaming quality.

Re:Macbooks are also the most expensive

[Enrique1218]

would even venture to guess that the Macbooks are gaming quality

That is if the video drivers ever start working!! Just out of curiousity, what errors were feedbacked when ATI's catalyst drivers were tried?

Re:Macbooks are also the most expensive

[sokoban]

THERE IS NO BIOS!!!

The ATI card that supports EFI booting identifies itself as a UGA card rather than VGA. Chances are, once there are EFI based ATI drivers they should work though.

Re:Macbooks are also the most expensive

[sulam]

They're absolutely gaming quality. I play World of Warcraft, and my new MBP is _lots_ faster than my dual proc G5. I do 40 person raids most of the time I'm online, and the MBP handles them just fine. Compared to my PC desktop running Windows XP it's not as fast, but that system is an AMD 4800+ and a 7800 GT OC.

Notably, I got the 7200 RPM drive on the MBP, maxed out the RAM, and of course am using the 2.16GHz processor.

Re:Macbooks are also the most expensive

[Enrique1218]

Oh yeah, thanks for that bit of info

Re:Macbooks are also the most expensive

[Apotsy]

and are pretty bulky

Don't understimate the importance of this. It will cost you more up front, but having a thinner, lighter laptop will make it much more enjoyable to use. Get one that's too heavy and clunky, and you may find yourself not wanting to use it very much, and even wishing you hadn't bought it.

Re:Macbooks are also the most expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of graphics card do you have in your dual G5?

My dual G5 (2.7 GHz with Radeon X800 GT) is slightly faster at 1600x1200 than my MacBook Pro (2.0 GHz) at 1440x900 for running WoW, so I mostly use my desktop for playing. Both have 2GB of RAM.

I'm actually surprised that the X1600 in my MacBook Pro doesn't make WoW faster than on my desktop; presumably the speed becomes CPU-bound once the GPU is "good enough".

Note that AMD (Opteron/Athlon64) beats the crap out of both G5 and Intel CPUs in terms of memory latency due to the integrated memory controller.

Re:Macbooks are also the most expensive

[darkmeridian]

The Lenovo Thinkpad T60 has ridiculously great build quality when compared to a Dell. You can actually press down on the back of the LCD screen without causing distortions on the LCD image. The keyboard is full-sized and solid. The laptop doesn't flex when you pick it up by a corner. You do get what you pay for.

The Reg sexed up our dossier

[saschasegan]

Just wanted to preemptively strike out and mention that the Reg "sexed up our dossier" a little, to use a British reference.

Over here at PC Mag/Gearlog (it's the same thing - Gearlog is the blog of PC Mag) we like to say that our tests show Apple makes a "fast" Windows machine, not "the fastest." As somebody else pointed out, while the MacBook squeaked out a win on the Photoshop test, it came in behind other Core Duo laptops on the Windows Media Encoder test. But the news in my mind isn't a one-second difference in this or that. It's that Apple's machines run Windows comparably to the best designed-for-Windows machines. That bodes very well for folks who want to have the best of both worlds by running both OSes natively.

We couldn't run 3DMark, Sysmark, etc. because of the missing video drivers - wouldn't have been fair. The Photoshop and Windows Media tests were the only ones of our standard benchmark suite we thought would generate results that made any proper sense, because they hit processor/disk/RAM rather than video.

Also, for the AMD fanboys, we haven't tested any AMD dual core notebooks yet, so we didn't have the data to compare those.

If you haven't already, read our original story: http://gearlog.com/blogs/gearlog/archive/2006/03/2 1/8212.aspx

Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier

[badmammajamma]

"But the news in my mind isn't a one-second difference in this or that. It's that Apple's machines run Windows comparably to the best designed-for-Windows machines."

Hmm...what exactly do think is different between an Intel box designed to run OSX and one designed to run WinXP? I really don't see how the OS has much sway here. After all, you can run Linux on an Intel box (desinged to run WinXP) and it works hot shit. OSX is based on BSD as I understand it, so why should it be any different?

Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier

[saschasegan]

Apple has a tendency to heavily customize their machines, and one of their selling points is a tight coupling between hardware and software (namely, OS X.) So we wanted to make sure there was nothing in the Macs that would have prevented XP from running to the limits of the performance of the hardware, and to prove that a dual-boot solution could be both viable and desirable. I'll personally wait for the video drivers to call it "desirable," but we're safely within the realm of viable.

Running these benchmarks also allowed a direct comparison between Apple hardware and other manufacturers' that always used to be cloaked a little by the difference in OSes. Now of course you can argue that the driver situation may have affected our results, but I hope this will be only the first of many data points. It's a start.

Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier

[reclusivemonkey]

Just wanted to preemptively strike out and mention that the Reg "sexed up our dossier" a little, to use a British reference.

El Reg in spurious journalism shocker? ...surely not.

Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier

[Tim Browse]

El Reg in spurious journalism shocker?

Indeed. I know I am shocked to my very core. Shocked, I tell you!

Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier

[Anonymous Coward]

This article was about dual cores, so untill you get yourself another core installed your shock can't be accuratly measured.

Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier

[drsmithy]

But the news in my mind isn't a one-second difference in this or that. It's that Apple's machines run Windows comparably to the best designed-for-Windows machines.

I fail to see why anyone with anything past a basic acquaintance with hardware would find this surprising, when talking about the MacBook Pro.

I could see some surprised regarding the Mini, or iMac, for those who have been around a while, as Apple has a long and glorious history of crippling their lower-end products to "encourage" customers to buy the higher end stuff, but the MacBook Pro *is* a high-end Mac. Apple always throw the best stuff they can into them.

Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier

[drsmithy]

Apple has a tendency to heavily customize their machines, [...]

Not for a very long time. All remotely current Macs are basically just PCs. Even the PPC models are basically just PCs with a different motherboard and CPU. Everything else is off-the-shelf (which is why that whole "Apple uses better hardware" meme is so laughable).

[...] and one of their selling points is a tight coupling between hardware and software (namely, OS X.)

There is no "tight coupling" per se (as OS X x86 running on non-Apple PCs has demonstrated). What there is, is a development process that is able to focus on a very small set of hardware to support and optimise for, and very effectively identify any hardware issues that might exist, then get them fixed (or develop workarounds).

Running these benchmarks also allowed a direct comparison between Apple hardware and other manufacturers' that always used to be cloaked a little by the difference in OSes. Now of course you can argue that the driver situation may have affected our results, but I hope this will be only the first of many data points. It's a start.

What will be more interested is comparing the performance between the OSes themselves, particularly in situations where the OS will actually have a non-trivial impact (ie: multiple processes with heavy I/O and large memory footprints).

Re:The Reg sexed up our dossier

[Blue Lozenge]

We couldn't run 3DMark, Sysmark, etc. because of the missing video drivers - wouldn't have been fair. The Photoshop and Windows Media tests were the only ones of our standard benchmark suite we thought would generate results that made any proper sense, because they hit processor/disk/RAM rather than video.

Are you sure the Windows Media tests don't use the graphics processor? According to ATI, the X1600 accelerates WMV9. Without the video drivers then that could also be considered an unfair test, no?

Re:How things change.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

A few years ago, the Mac crowd said there was no need for stuff like PCI, AGP, PMT, SMP, protected memory, Intel, USB, etc. etc....

Ummm, what? More than a few years ago macs already shipped with USB and PCI by default. Heck macs had USB before anyone else was producing a significant number of peripherals for it. The only item on this list I ever heard people argue against was Intel (as in processors).

But just how is a Mac running x86 and Windows XP, a Mac?

Macintosh is a brand name. How is a Dell Inspiron running Linux still a Dell Inspiron? The answer to both questions is that is the name under which it is sold.

Re:Apple no happy

[Midnight Thunder]

I bet Apple is PISSED right now. They're handing all their technology over to Microsoft.

But Apple is get paid $$ for the hardware, so they can't be that annoyed.

Re:Apple no happy

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose they are pouting all the way to the bank. Ka-ching, way to sell more hardware with standard software... Ka-ching indeed!

Re:How things change.

[MSFanBoi2]

No, what made USB massive was Windows 98.

For more proof of that we can watch the failure of Firewire...

Non Mac specs not given

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldnt help but notice the Mac had 2 GB of RAM .. what did the others have (at what cost) ? Also could the gfx card be skewing for some of the benchmarks?

Re:Ummm...

[ceoyoyo]

Minimum memory configuration on a MacBook Pro is 512MB and 1GB for the 2.0GHz model.

Why?

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Why should the MacBook be any faster then any other DuoCore notebook out there. They use the same CPU, memory technology, hard drive technology, etc, etc, etc. Either the original article is biased or people just are not aware of how similar the MacBook is to any other PC notebook running the DuoCore CPU.

Can anyone name one reason (not "because its an Apple") as to why the technology in the MacBook should run faster then in an equivalently equiped PC? And I don't believe EFI has anything to do with it either.

Perhaps Intel purposely gave Apple a leg up on the DuoCore chipset by perhaps slightly overclocking them to give them an edge, or some special hardware tweak that only the MacBook is getting over other PC notebooks. I just can't see how the same equipment can run better on one system over another.

Re:Why?

[hahiss]

Dude, its because the Apple has speed holes

Re:Why?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why should the MacBook be any faster then any other DuoCore notebook out there.

Because each laptop uses slightly different hardware. They use different brands, with different specs, and in different configurations. For any given test, one will win. If you read the article you'd know Macbook Pros scored about the same as the best other Duo Core notebooks out there. Sure they took first in a given photoshop test, but not by a really significant margin. They did worse in some other tests. There are no conspiracies here.

People willfully misinterpreting this test should be ashamed of the FUD they are spreading. This does not prove MacBooks are the "fastest" laptop. It proves they are (aside from the non-existant video drivers) as good as anything else out there for running Windows. This is good news for people who plan to dual boot. This is a good sign for those interested in emulating/VMing Windows. It is just trivia to anyone else.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Love. It run on love.

Re:Why?

[Darth Liberus]

And a VTEC sticker!

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

how about the battery on it?
Do it love you long time?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOok athe the specs on the bus speeds and the archetecture connecting the varrious components, You will find that Apple does a lisghtly better job or recognising and improving the bottlenecks in the system

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should the MacBook be any faster then any other DuoCore notebook out there? Because when Microsoft learned that XP might be able to run on Apple machines and could then be compared directly with OS X on the same hardware, Balmer threatened to throw a chair at XP if it let the side down.

Re:Why?

[ExampleUserAccount]

Calling FUD is a little much, but your comment is otherwise a sane response and a good summary of the subject, thanks.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, it's called I/O - that "work" that the chipset and motherboard do - running with (otherwise) the same CPU and RAM and Disk it can make clear difference between a well thought-out motherboard and a piece of crap whipped up in a day. :-)

Re:Why?

[Hanthus]

Because the macbook pro is using a 2.16GHz and the others are using a 2.0GHz processor. Why don't you guys read the fucking thing before asking AND answering questions?

Re:Why?

[drsmithy]

Why should the MacBook be any faster then any other DuoCore notebook out there.

It's not. The delta between the fastest PC laptop and the MacBook was *1 second*, representing aproximately a 1% - 1.5% difference. That's a rounding error, not a "win".

(Additionally, the "Windows Media encode" was a somewhat more significant 7% slower on the MacBook Pro.)

Of more interest was the fact that the slower PCs were on the order of *40 seconds* slower - although they also all have basically the same times (1:52, 1:52, 1:55), so whatever it is that is making them slower is the same on all of them (my guess would be the hard disk, but without knowing anything specific about the machines, it's hard to say for sure). Strangely, all their "Windows Media Encode" times are basically the same - so whatever is slowing down the PS benchmarks isn't having the same effect on their media encoding speed.

I just can't see how the same equipment can run better on one system over another.

Things like memory timings and different hard disks can make machines with identical processors have *substantially* different performance characteristics (memory timings much less so than hard disks). There's also things like video cards, but none of the tests here would be meaningfully affected by the machine's video card.

Re:Why?

[nine-times]

People willfully misinterpreting this test should be ashamed of the FUD they are spreading. This does not prove MacBooks are the "fastest" laptop. It proves they are (aside from the non-existant video drivers) as good as anything else out there for running Windows.

I think to some degree, the intention here is to spread some anti-FUD. The purpose isn't really to prove the Apple notebooks are significantly superior hardware in any way-- it's good hardware, but generally it uses the same components as other laptops. But there's a general conception that gets spread around that Apple is somehow incompetent and making sub-standard products. You know, those trolls with a 2 MB file taking 20 hours to transfer?

Anyway, the real point is that they're pretty much as good performers as any of these new Dual Core laptops, but with sleak designs, nice features, and the ability to run OSX. This is the first meaningful opportunity to benchmark Apple hardware vs. Dell (or whoever), and the point is that no, the Apple hardware does not somehow suck for being Apple.

Re:Ummm...

[ceoyoyo]

That's GOOD. Nothing like ordering a G5 with 256 MB, throwing that away and putting in 8 GB or whatever from a commodity memory place. Oh, and saving $1000 while you're at it. I think Apple puts the base configs on their workstation machines really low on purpose because they don't want to be bothered running a big memory business (no profit) so they're tacitly encouraging you to go buy your own memory.

Re:How things change.

[ceoyoyo]

Not to mention he posts the same thing, word for word, in any somewhat Apple related discussion. Also, his nickname is MSFanboi. ;)

Re:Apple no happy

[ceoyoyo]

Not to mention they get to put their OS on each one so that's what you see when you boot up. Kind of like MS did with IE... except OS X is nice. ;)

I'm confused...

[Anonymous Coward]

A few weeks ago, Slashdot posted a story saying that the Dell laptop ran OS X faster than the Apple.

And now the Apple is running Windows XP faster than dedicated Windows machines?

I think someone has their wires crossed.

Re:I'm confused...

[metamatic]

Believe it or not, OS X, Windows XP and Photoshop are all different pieces of software.

Suck it up Apple Fanboys !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter what zig or zag Apple takes, the Applepologists will rationalize it.

Look how they pretend that they are an alternative to Microsoft when Bill Gates has always maintained Apple as a sort of minimum security prison for people who shy away from Microsoft. I don't know how apple fans can look themselves in the face after that little stunt. The sad thing is, they could have jumped on the OSS bandwagon then when it really meant something. Instead, they rationalized away and still do.

Re:Suck it up Apple Fanboys !!!

[AnalystX]

If it makes you feel better, yes, people have a rationale for choosing a particular OS platform over another. Wow. You have a way with words: "[...] they pretend that they are an alternative to Microsoft [...] away from Microsoft." Yeah, I find it quite common to not do what I'm not doing without a computer from a company it isn't from. $150 million for an under-the-table patent settlement does not a merger make.

Re:Suck it up Apple Fanboys !!!

[aristotle-dude]

For fuck sakes. Do you people have to bring up that small amount of money every damn time? It really was not an "investment" but rather part of an out of court settlement for the stolen Quicktime code in WMP. The other part was a commitment to continue development of Office for the mac. The latter agreement has been renewed several times and has proven lucrative for both Apple and MSFT.

Speaking of OSS, could you enlighten us as to how being an Apple user is incompatible with OSS and what a select few people running XP has anything to do with Apple and OSS other than the fact that the software will be a OSS project?

As for Apple and the OSS communityHere are a few links for you:

Apple's involvement with OSS.
Freshmeat OS X projects
Source Forge Projects

Re:Ummm...

[kainewynd2]

I would have agreed about 7 months ago... that's the last time they sold anything but the eMac with anything less than 512 MB RAM.

Check out the apple store and see for yourself now... http://store.apple.com/

Re:How things change.

[Synesthesiatic]

Grandparent needs to get a life. He posted pretty much the same thing yesterday and it's no more true now than it was then. Good thing we're around to set the record straight!

Currently

[Upaut]

The solution of many problems, by having a Windows partition on ones Macbook, does have a few issues that will both effect preformance, and ones comfort. With the GPU not having any drivers yet, the CPU is doing all the work. So slower animations, more heat (massive amounts) being generated, and an inability to play any games. Now, I am still glad that I have this partition, so I can use a lkot of "Windows only" software my work/school wants me to be able to run, but until the graphics chip is running, I don't think most benchmarkes will be really reliable. That and while running Windows, until a driver is written, I really recomend that you don't have the machine in your lap, unless its a really cold day...

Other issues that are less important are:
*Trackpad does not work
*That little camera doesn't work

Re:Currently

[Anonymous Coward]

In regards to your "*Trackpad does not work". This is incorrect. I know first hand since I am running XP on my MBP.

Adoption

[Truman Starr]

Ok, I am all for the Mac - my first 'puter was a II-GS back when I was 6 or so. But I haven't been following the hardware "jam XP into a Mac" soap opera like some have, so I'm not sure of the complexity of getting both OSes to share one living space (Talk about "The Odd Couple").

I am, interested, however, in hearing about it as it pertains to adoption by non-techies. I read /. but I've never had a dual-boot system myself. I have a Powerbook, an Ubuntu box, and my company thinkpad, so I've never needed to. Each box does its particular tasks, and does them pretty well (with the exception of the T23 my company insists is SOTA).

However, the specs from this article look quite promising. Like many of you, I salivate at the thought of running not only WoW on my MacBook, but games from developers who don't touch OSX. I'm not foolish enough to presume I'm in any kind of majority on that, but I think it has ramifications beyond the hardcore. I think when the new intel iBooks come out, they will be the perfect computer for just about any non-technical person; i.e. students, moms, grandmoms, whomever. If you can give them something familiar, adoption is going to be 1000 times easier. I'm not asking that Apple blow away other OEM's while running windows. The fact that it comes close (in all of the tests so far) is good enough for me. And grandma too.

Re:Adoption

[easter1916]

Thank you so very much for not using the slightly creepy "Aunt Tilly" example from E.S.R.

Re:Adoption

[Gorbag]

I read /. but I've never had a dual-boot system myself.

There's the point of confusion. Slashdot is a write-only medium.

Re:How things change.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. No peripheral manufacturere bothered with making USB devices. After 2 years on the market, there were only 12 usb devices. Then Apple added USB. 6 months later, there were over 400 usb devices. All marketed towards Apple customers. Read back issues of MacWorld and look at the ads. Dumbass.

Re:How things change.

[the_humeister]

I'm getting a sense of deja vu...

Benchmarking the compiler

[Rob Y.]

Ultimately, a Windows vs. Mac CPU benchmark on the same hardware would amount to a comparison of the code generated by the respective compilers.

Don't know how fast the code generated by the Visual C++ compiler is, but I've read that the proprietary Intel compiler generates much faster code than gcc, which (I think) is the default compiler for OS/X apps these days. Does that bode poorly for the Mac in any benchmark wars?

Re:Benchmarking the compiler

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know how fast the code generated by the Visual C++ compiler is, but I've read that the proprietary Intel compiler generates much faster code than gcc, which (I think) is the default compiler for OS/X apps these days. Does that bode poorly for the Mac in any benchmark wars?

I'm not sure about the switch to Intel by Mac, so someone correct me if I'm wrong, but they will only be using Intel processors, right? So why don't they just compile their OS with intel's proprietary compiler. It supports full ANSI/ISO C++, doesn't it?

Re:Benchmarking the compiler

[pomo monster]

Apple might already be using icc to compile parts of OS X, for all I know, but a big problem with blindly substituting compilers is that gcc and icc expect different command line arguments. Thus it'll take some time to rewrite the makefiles, retarget the Xcode projects, and whatnot to be icc-aware. At least, that's how I understand it--hopefully someone more knowledgeable will be along to correct my mistakes. :-)

Re:Benchmarking the compiler

[larry bagina]

Cocoa is based on Objective C. Apple's custom version of gcc/Objective C to be precise. The kernel (Darwin) and other C/C++ parts could potentially be recompiled in icc, but the kernel speed issues are due to mach's design, not poor compiler optimization.

Re:How things change.

[Anonymous Coward]

No they don't. Apple is referring to everything as "Mac" now. Go ahead...go to the Apple site and try to find a recent page with the entire word "Macintosh" on it. Strangely, a search for "Macintosh" on the Apple site search engine returns some pages that when you go to them don't actually have that word on the page. Now, most references to "Macintosh" are to old hardware and software.

It's like Macs no longer refer to apples (the fruit), but to English rain gear.

What a retarded article

[greg1104]

It's been widely noted that the basic hardware in the MacBook pro is nearly identical to that in the Acer model mentioned in TFA; see http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/ faq/technical_performance_2.html for a rundown. So it's no wonder the run-time is the same.

The appropriate conclusion here is "Macbook Pro runs XP as fast as the fastest PC with the same CPU and chipset", to which I would say, duh!

Re:What a retarded article

[spxero]

The Acer didn't have the same specs as the MacBook, it was 2.0GHz and the MacBook was 2.16GHz. Yes, the systems that you have given have the same specs, but not the ones from the article. And the Acer didn't lose by much (1 second) in the photoshop test, and beat the MacBook by 30 sec in the Windows Media Encode. Granted, the graphics drivers aren't ready for the Mac, but does that matter for encoding processes? That only affects (don't quote me) graphics output to the monitor.

I know for sure I'm not going out anytime soon to get a Mac (my Linux/Windows setup works just fine). And with a price tag of close to $400 more for the MacBook, the Acer seems a little better if you're running windows only.

What I would be interested in seeing is similar tests done on the MacBook (or iMac) with MacOS vs. Windows. That should be the real comparison. Now that the playing field is essentially leveled(all intel), better comparison results can be derived.

Re:What a retarded article

[the_humeister]

True, now that the hardware is the same, true speed tests of each operating system can begin. And as we've already seen, and as mentioned several posts up, OS X is slower than Linux and FreeBSD.

Photoshop Test

[chowhound]

I've always felt the photoshop tests were an absurd measure of a computer's speed. I run Photoshop CS1 on my G4/400 1GB at home. The only time I ran into a problem was attempting to work on a backlit movie poster for a theatre - 3x5 foot by 300 dpi, with layers, effects & filters. But that is an absurdly huge file. As a designer for 10 years, I never encountered a file that big.

The point is that today's computers are overpowered. The now-deprecated Quad 2.7 G5 is vastly more powerful than any Photoshop jockey needs. Unless you're rastering 3D shiz or crunching a full length DVD-quality movie (neither of which requires Photoshop) it's just gonna be an issue for most users.

Re:Photoshop Test

[eMartin]

"I've always felt the photoshop tests were an absurd measure of a computer's speed."

It's a lot harder to benchmark "real world" use.

Re:Photoshop Test

[Anonymous Coward]

The now-deprecated Quad 2.7 G5...

Out of curiosity, how is a Quad 2.7Ghz G5 deprecated, considering the fastest PowerMac ever (and currently) offered by Apple is the Quad 2.5Ghz G5?

Re:Photoshop Test

[Anonymous Coward]

haha! As a professional retoucher, I heartily disagree with your comment. Firstly, I regularly work with files much larger than the one you discribe. The project I am working with now involves one image that is about 3.5 gigs on disk and larger in RAM, and that's by no means the biggest I've run into. I can ALWAYS use a faster, more capable computer.
Second, you are thinking small with regard to PS. You aren't thinking in terms of what it "could" do, as opposed to what it has historically done. Off the top of my head, I can imagine a number of features that photoshop doesn't currently have that would only be feasible with more powerful machines, like "live" filter layers that render in real-time, Liquify and (the useless) Extract Image as tools, rather than separate panes (which is done because they are too processor-intensive to run in real time), etc. Plus lots of other features that I can't even imagine, because no one has even considered them possible before.
Bottom line -- give a creative programmer capacity and he/she will find a way to use it.

Re:Photoshop Test

[MacBoy]

I completely agree.
Photoshop used to be a great benchmark, because computers used to be sllllooowwwwww. Remember when Photoshop power users could drop a few thousand on a fancy DSP card for their Mac? In fact a couple of Macs (the Centris 660Av and the Quadra 810AV ca. 1992 or so) came equipped with a 25/33 MHz DSP on-board to handle certain realtime stuff, like softmodem. Adobe didn't waste any time supporting this DSP to accelerate Photoshop, with a pretty sizable improvement. The point is, people used to waste so much time waiting for Photoshop, that anything, absolutely anything, that could improve its performance was a godsend.

These days, modern CPUs are real powerhouses. I have an older Mac (Dual 866 MHz G4, 1 GB RAM), and I have never cursed at it while waiting for it to complete a PS operation. I have never had to wait. Today, any CPU is pretty much fast enough for PS work... It's the RAM you have to worry about. The instant PS starts hitting the disk during an operation, you might as well have a P100 in there.

Re:How things change.

[rolfwind]

Um, weren't Mac computers the first to come out with USB (and firewire)? I understand intel invented the USB standard, but no PC compatible motherboard manufacture actually touched it until it became more popular on the Mac.

And what does certain hardware do whether or not something is a Mac?

How about "winesap"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or in the case of Apple fanboys ...

"whine sap".

Another over-hyped and mis-interpreted article

[DjCheeto]

Ok so it beat the other laptops in photoshop by 1 second... But totally lost to the other laptops in encoding windows media by 30 seconds. Give me a break, this does not make the Macbook the fastest windows xp laptop. I have nothing against macbooks, but c'mon, we need some quality control on slashdot.

Re:How things change.

[grand_it]

Ummm, what? More than a few years ago macs already shipped with USB and PCI by default. Heck macs had USB before anyone else was producing a significant number of peripherals for it.

Ooops, they're doin' it again :(

Apple dumped Pc Card in favour of ExpressCard way too early, imho.

Sure, for many purposes (Ethernet, modem, Usb, Firewire...) Pc Cards are quite obsolete today, because all this features come free with every notebook (except for the modem in MacBook Pro)

Here in Old Europe, however, GSM/Umts connect cards are quite popular among execs and road warriors. As of today, there is no such thing as an ExpressCard GSM/Umts modem.

Heck, the PCMCIAssociation lists a whopping-fifteen-items-list of available modules in his website...

Please don't forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

...about the cost of ownership, just not the cost to acquire the hardware. With Apple, you don't need all the anti-whatever software and it's associated upkeep. Also, Apple's hardware reliability and customer service are rated far above the pack (by Consumer Reports). There is a reason why Apple products cost more---they're worth more!

Re:Please don't forget...

[thpht]

..about the cost of ownership, just not the cost to acquire the hardware. With Apple, you don't need all the anti-whatever software and it's associated upkeep. Also, Apple's hardware reliability and customer service are rated far above the pack (by Consumer Reports). There is a reason why Apple products cost more---they're worth more!

...until you put Windows on it.

Re:Please don't forget...

[Budenny]

Yes, but you do need the annual software upgrades at $100+ a pop. More than pays for the anti virus...

that's awesome..

[nmeu]

i just want stever to hook me up with a 'home' version of osx that i can afford..hehe i can't afford his hardware... let alone his os... so i'm stuck with linux and 180 day trials of xp pro.. if i want to keep it legit.. and's what's with the new intel logo? and fedora cores new logo.. what's next? a new slashdot logo?? what would that look like i wonder?? i don't use photoshop.. i used to at work because i didn't have to buy it. what's wrong with the GIMP? benchmark that on the new dual core lappys... then say something.. excuse my rambling please.. i live in vermont and my friend works at green mountain coffee roasters and my freezer is full of the good stuff.. tried a new one this morning.. haha.. take care...

Re:that's awesome..

[metamatic]

Look, if you can't afford $600 for a computer, that's fine, but you're going to be stuck with crap whether you buy a PC or a Mac. Apple has decided it doesn't want to compete in the "cheap crap" market, so your only hope would be to get a second hand machine.

Alternatively, pick up a $99 barebones system from Tiger Direct, or a cheap PC from Walmart, and run Linux on it. Linux isn't so bad, I use it every day.

Re:that's awesome..

[nmeu]

i have 6 pretty sick boxes.. i'm just cheap about software. plus i'm a musician so that's where all my $$$s go.. i was going to hook up a mac mini when they first came out but i bought a drumkit instead. this story is silly.

Re:Triple Threat

[Anonymous Coward]

Then get a better job and/or stop drinking a case of mountain dew every day...

Re:How things change.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firewire has been adopted by PC manufacturers for many years now.
And no one who needs serious performance uses USB. Dumbass.

Bull

[Anonymous Coward]

My Dell Inspiron 9400 with Nvidia 7800 and T2600 will burn any mac book for less money.

Re:Bull

[Anonymous Coward]

...and would require a forklift to move around.

Oh, and I think I'm going to cut my eyes out now, I looked at a picture of it >.

Multithreading

[everphilski]

It is a multithreaded application. Running on two processors. Meaning you'd need a single processor with **double** the speed in order to have a similar benchmark. In a few months when AMD has a mobile dual core offering then the comparisons can and will be made.

Re:Multithreading

[jonnythan]

Dual core processors basically double performance in Photoshop and Windows Media Encoder.

Hmm...how did the Slashvertiser get 1st post?

[sweetnjguy29]

I wonder......

Re:Hmm...how did the Slashvertiser get 1st post?

[Paradise Pete]

Hmm...how did the Slashvertiser get 1st post?

He didn't. Not even close. Are you sorting by rating or by time?

Re:How things change.

[powerlord]

Here in Old Europe, however, GSM/Umts connect cards are quite popular among execs and road warriors. As of today, there is no such thing as an ExpressCard GSM/Umts modem.

I agree. It does seem like peripherals are a bit slow to come out, but new Dell laptops are also touting ExpressCard so its not like its only Apple (like when FireWire first came out).

On the other hand, GSM connect cards based on ExpressCard are supposed to be out by June or Sept (depends on who you believe and who your provider is). Not great, not terrible. If this is a deal-breaker for you on getting a new MacBook, hold off till they have what you want. Running Mac on Intel is still "early adopter" territory anyway since quite a few apps aren't out in Universal Binary format yet.

Why a laptop?

[cloudmaster]

So I'm curious, why does Photoshop being faster on one laptop than another mean anything? Surely if you care about all-out photoshop performance, you'll have a desktop machine with a real power supply to drive real processors, room for real memory, and a real display? This laptop's slower for almost everything else, and not appropriate for the onething it's faster at.

Yay benchmarks. :( I'd be more imperssed if they laid the laptops out on a table at a college library and timed which one got stolen fastest. That'd test the *real* value of each laptop...

Re:Why a laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Apple product would be stolen first. Why? Because their resale value is rediculously higher than a PC.

The fact here is that it's doing something quite well that it wasn't designed to do, run a windows app "faster" than machines made for windows. And I don't believe you read the article, because there were other computers besides a MacBook Pro mentioned. Maybe next time check out what's said before you comment.

Re:Why a laptop?

[lubricated]

And why does getting more bandwidth with 802.11g over 802.11b mean anything. After all if you wanted speed you would have sat down and plugged in anyway.

Seriously, it's always a comprimise.
I always run CPU intensive apps(mostly simulations and statistical analysis) however, I certainly more comfortable to do it from my lay-z-boy than sitting upright. 17-inches is plenty of display.

>> That'd test the *real* value of each laptop...
You don't want the laptop that gets stolen first, because you don't want your laptop stolen.
You probably don't want the one stolen last, because it's probably a shitter.

Re:Why a laptop?

[zygote]

There are a lot of newspaper and wire service photographers who's only machine is a laptop as they are out in the field all the time and working images on deadline . For them, the faster the better because using a desktop machine isn't an option. I imagine there might be folks in other industries with the same issues regarding needing the fasting laptop they can get because they can't use a desktop.

Re:Why a laptop?

[cloudmaster]

Apples and oranges. If one laptop weighs more and runs programs slower, but manages to get 5 bits/second more out of its 802.11g interface than another, it'd be stupid to announce the one with slightly faster WI-FI as the "best laptop". No one buys a laptop for fast networking, and even those that do aren't gonna notice the marginal speed improvement on the networking speed - or the marginal speed difference in Photoshop. Esp. if all the other programs are faster on another laptop...

As far as running CPU-intensive stuff from the comfort of your chair - I generally sit on the couch when I'm doing that too. But I'm using VNC or XDM (depnds where I am) to run the programs on a real computer and using my pansy-assed laptop as a display. With the several thousand dollars I saved by admitting to myself that I'll never get as much computing power out of a laptop, I was able to get an even faster desktop workstation, and new tires on my car. ;)

Re:How things change.

[twicesliced]

What was the first Mac with USB? Apparently it was the Rev.A G3 iMac? (1998) I have an Intel motherboard (AL440LX) from 1997 that has two USB ports on it...

Re:Apple no happy

[Enrique1218]

While on the subject of memory, ever notice how Apple overcharges fpr memory. I'll pay $60 for RAM from crucial and Apple will charge $150 for the same one. When I install the memory, I dumbfounded to see that the memory I am installing and the ones already there from the factory are made by the same company. This whole thing has vexed me for years because they could put more RAM in and not affect the price of the system (but their bottom line).

Re:How things change.

[Gilmoure]

'Course he's a troll. He copies/pastes the same message into every story about new Macs. Don't know what his beef is. If he don't see the point in them, don't use 'em. Vote with his pocket book.

OSX is not BSD

[Medievalist]

OSX is based on BSD as I understand it

In the same sense that cars are based on horse-drawn carriages, certainly.

But OSX has as least as much Mach lineage as it has BSD. It's often characterized as a bloated train wreck of an OS, but Apple has been able to get decent performance by controlling the hardware platform (they don't have to attempt to optimize for everything on the market, they can focus on being really good on optimal equipment).

Start reading here to learn more.

Mac zealots, of course, would rather say "it's based on mature, polished BSD" or "it's based on the highly evolved Mach microkernel" rather than making a halfway statement like "the OS X kernel may be lacking in polish and efficiency but it has a rich collection of APIs and excellent graphical interface optimization".

Re:OSX is not BSD

[drsmithy]

But OSX has as least as much Mach lineage as it has BSD. It's often characterized as a bloated train wreck of an OS, but Apple has been able to get decent performance by controlling the hardware platform (they don't have to attempt to optimize for everything on the market, they can focus on being really good on optimal equipment).

OS X's performance is pretty poor, with everything from raw numbers (process creation times, disk I/O - anandtech did a bunch of benchmarking comparing to Linux) through to subjective "teh snappy" observations of GUI responsiveness.

I used to think this was just the sucky G4 platform holding everything back, but even G5 Macs are comparitively slow running OS X (I have not yet had a chance to sit down for a decent length of time with an x86 Mac, but I doubt it would make much difference, as the G5 platform was quite good). I think they just need to buckle down and do some hardcore low-level systems optimisations, rather than flashy new features (and probably will, for the release after 10.5 - OS X is maturing and new features/fixing obvious user-visible problems is/are becoming less important).

Re:Ummm...

[temojen]

oh good god. a 8MP image can be printed at 20X30 and look better than 35mm film.

And a 35mm image can be printed at 20x30 and look better than an 8MPixel digital sensor image. Untill you specify the specific cameras, lenses, tripods, subject, lighting, scanner, scanner software, raw converter, film, processing lab, camera settings, postprocessing steps, printing technology, and intended use, it is you that's trolling. In the mean time I'll continue using what works for me.

Most pro photographers do not shoot at more than 6MP because THERE IS NO USE for higher res right now.

It really depends on the intended use of their photos. Newspaper and portrait photographers shoot low-rez because that suits their needs. You can be sure though that PlayBoy's feature photographers are shooting full-frame digital at least (although I suspect medium-format Kodak Portra NC judging by the contrast, tonality, and colour balance).

I often choose 35mm Print film because it gives me resolution slightly better than I'd get with a 1Ds, but much nicer exposure lattitude. Plus I get smaller depth of field than with a sub-frame digital, without having to shell out $20,000 for a 1Ds and a bunch of new lenses.

Pros are not rushing out to buy new digitals they are getting FANTASTIC results with 6mp right now.

You seem to be confusing newspaper photographers with all pro photographers. It depends on their intended use. Fashion photographers are just starting to go digital (from MF) with the introduction of full-frame digitals and digital backs for MF.

you weenies that think that megapixels are everything are getting on my nerves.

People who think that how they use their camera is how everyone uses their camera, and what they expect from prints is what everyone expects from prints get on my nerves.

Re:Ummm...

[temojen]

And On-topic... I wasn't trolling, I was annoyed that when I bought my mac a little over a year ago I had to immediately get more ram to be able to do what I bought it for. It happens to be the same thing this test was for...

Make up your mind, damnit!

[modecx]

First you say that the speed of a computer is dependant on the speed of the parts that make it up, and then you say "there's more to how fast a computer is than the speed of its individual parts." You'd make a damn fine politician, methinks.

Which is it? You can't have it both ways...and if it's the latter, where does the extra power come from? Magical pixie dust?

Re:Make up your mind, damnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Differences in cache size, cache speed, disk access time, and disk throughput, among other things"

The parent outlined the above things as being being the other significant parts. CPU, RAM and bus being equal, if those other factors are faster, the machine is faster- or can't you read?

If he would make a great politician, you'd make a poor voter.

Re:Make up your mind, damnit!

[superflyguy]

A computer is the SUM of it's parts, not the GREATEST of it's parts. The parts need to work synnergistically for it to be fast, and the only way a single component can significantly affect the system as a whole is by being a bottleneck.

Re:Make up your mind, damnit!

[modecx]

I'm sure all of that made perfect sense to you; but I'll take it upon myself to speak for everyone else when I say: Huh?

Re:Make up your mind, damnit!

[k_187]

he's saying that having God' processor won't do you any good if its paired with a 3200 RPM HD and PC100 Ram

Re:Make up your mind, damnit!

[MysteriousPreacher]

I'll admit I had to look up the exact definition and correct spelling of synergistically (save us from the psuedo-intellectual bullshit words oh jebus) but the rest of it seemed pretty clear.

Overall a perfectly cromulent post.

Re:Apple no happy

[Gilmoure]

Apple just wants to sell boxes. Whether they're little music players or laptops or a Jonathon Ives designed toaster, they get happy when people buy their stuff. What you do with it afterwards is your concern.

Re:Ummm...

[soft_guy]

It's OK for people who are comfortable adding their own memory - and for those who aren't they get soaked by Apple's super-high prices on pre-loaded RAM. There are probably a lot of people in the middle running with too little memory because they don't know better and wouldn't know how to install the RAM if they did know the cheap places to buy it from and knew about the benefit they would get.

The GPP is right that Apple should just buy the cheap memory and load up all their systems. It would make the average person see the full speed of the Mac and it would make life easier for everyone. (Probably including Apple.)

FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a better example of misinterpreting the results then it is of FUD. Not that I agree with the claims, but don't call it FUD when it isn't.

Re:Apple no happy

[Anonymous Coward]

No, nobody has ever noticed how vendors charge more for parts that you could buy separately by yourself. Thanks for letting us know. Seriously.

Re:How things change.

[rizzo320]

You are correct. The iMac G3 was the first to have only USB ports. The Blue & White Power Mac G3 was the second, followed by the "Lombard" PowerBook G3.

Although Apple may not have been the first to use USB, they were the first to remove the legacy ports to force peripheral and accessory manufacturers to introduce USB based devices. They were also one of the first computer manufacturers to encourage the ports use. I remember installing multiple labs of Dell Optiplex Gn+ and GXi workstations with USB disabled by default in the BIOS. It was until a year or two later that USB was enabled by default on all of their Optiplex models. Plus, Microsoft's OS USB support really didn't work well until Windows 98 (for DOS based) and Windows 2000 (NT based OS) were released.

AMD dual core laptops DO exist!

[spookymonster]

Check out the FX7 from Hypersonic (http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/FX7/), a Clevo whitebox available from several other vendors as well.

Granted, at 12lbs and ~1 hour battery life, it is neither light nor highly mobile. Still, as a portable desktop replacement, it kicks ass compared to the Intel duos used in the article.

Re:How things change.

[soft_guy]

Yeah, the Mac only got PCI what...12 years ago? (PowerMac 9500 was the first PCI Mac.) Prior to that, they had NuBus which was basically the same thing, but it lost out to the PCI standard.

Apple was the vendor that really caused USB to take off...8 or 9 years ago.

And let's lump Intel in there with protected memory.

ugh

[Danzigism]

hmm.. nope.. sorry.. thats definitely not worth $2,100.00

Re:Ummm...

[ceoyoyo]

Apple probably should put in some stern recommendations about memory. Note that the new minis ship with 512MB minimum, and the MacBook is 512MB/1GB default. I'd hate to see them NOT allow you to downgrade the memory though. It's actually kind of a shame they don't let you buy without memory... my lab has a lot of 256MB DIMMS lying around. It IS nice to have your toy work out of the box though.

Re:How things change.

[bloodstains]

'Macintosh' appears in the title of this page:
http://guide.apple.com/index.lasso

Dumb question? Dual mouse buttons anyone?

[lonesometrainer]

Hi,

how do you "simulate" your second mouse button with a MacBook (without external mouse) on a Windows XP machine?

bye!

Re:Dumb question? Dual mouse buttons anyone?

[Lord Naughty]

You're right. Dumb question.

Re:Dumb question? Dual mouse buttons anyone?

[akhomerun]

control + click

it's been like that on macs forever.

anyone with a laptop should probably get a small wireless mouse anyway, they are way better than using a track pad anyway.

Re:Dumb question? Dual mouse buttons anyone?

[toddestan]

control + click

it's been like that on macs forever.

Yes, that's great. We all know that.

However, control+click doesn't do squat in Windows XP.

Re:Dumb question? Dual mouse buttons anyone?

[Eljay451]

Shift-F10 simulates a right mouse click in Windows.

Re:Dumb question? Dual mouse buttons anyone?

[MKalus]

You may want to complain about that to Microsoft, not Apple.

What about Acer Aspire 9504WSMi?

[Anonymous Coward]

Acer Aspire 9504WSMi is the fastest notebook outthere at the moment, I think, thanks to the 2GHz Pentium M. And it's cheap too.

See full review.

Re:How things change.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://developer.apple.com/business/macproductsgui de/

Photoshop...on a laptop...

[goofyspouse]

Sorry...this is a big "who the fizzuck cares" article. Anyone purposely running Photoshop on a laptop needs their head examined. Get a desktop for this sort of thing, for chrissakes.

Re:Photoshop...on a laptop...

[SpiralSpirit]

Well thats a pretty ignorant attitude. There are alot of students (like myself) who are required to buy laptops with the adobe design suite and/or CAD programs for design courses.

Re:Photoshop...on a laptop...

[bbc]

"Anyone purposely running Photoshop on a laptop needs their head examined."

The freelancers that come to work at our ad agency typically do not lug their Powermacs around on a cart. A laptop is slightly more convenient for them. And since we pay them more in a day than someone of your intelligence takes home in a week, we do not expect them to require half an hour to set up their computer.

Re:Photoshop...on a laptop...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone purposely running Photoshop on a laptop needs their head examined.
I don't run Photoshop on my laptop, but I run Gimp, so I suppose I should get examined twice. However, please note that I would be happy to receive the Bi-G5 you seem to be offering me in replacement of my laptop, which is getting old.

Gimp

[tsa]

Why not try the Gimp? That runs on both platforms.

Re:Gimp

[bursch-X]

Because the GIMP runs under X and not Aqua? While this is sort of nativeish, X is definitely not the native windowing environment. However there is a completely native Windows version of the GIMP. I don't think this would be good way to compare performance.

I for my part feel that in X the windowing environment feels more sluggish than in Aqua.

Re:Gimp

[tsa]

Good point. I completely forgot about that.

Re:Ummm...

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to know quite a lot about those Playboy photos. Spend a lot of time studying them?

The Reliability Factor

[lullabud]

I really don't think that Apple's are overpriced when you consider how reliable they are. I'm still using the original 12" powerbook which I purchased over 3 years ago and it still runs fine. Being an IT guy, I've seen numerous Gateway, Dell and Alienware laptops fall apart in that time. I'd personally take an IBM or a Dell if I couldn't go with Apple, but I go with the higher priced Apple hardware because it's more reliable. I'd rather have a machine that doesn't require replacement parts every 6-12 months of 24/7 usage. Also, target-disk mode (only available on Apple hardware, afaik) is invaluable if you ever need to back up your entire hard disk, repair it, or do any other maintinence on it that requires full read/write permission to the filesystem.

This just in!

[HitScan]

In a news story released earlier today it was noted that 2.16GHz notebooks are indeed faster than 2.0GHz notebooks. Citing aspects of their construction such as "This one appears to have the bigger number," and "I guess they used a faster chip in that one," critics rained high praise upon the faster equipment. It is currently unclear whether the testing method employed will encourage more individuals and business to drop what they're doing and purchase their own faster laptops from this rebel manufacturer, or if they will demand that their current supplies "get them some of those faster ones."

Konqueror?

[Kadin2048]

I recommend Konqueror, but in order to get it you'll need to install KDE ... which I think is a good thing, but other people would probably burn me at the stake for saying so. I like it because it renders almost exactly like Safari does on my Mac (which makes sense, they have the same innards, to a point), and it also acts as a file browser and does some neat stuff in that department as well (in particular it supports fish://, which is pretty neat and lets you browse and edit remote files via SSH as if they were local, without setting up NFS or Samba).

Along with the fact that KDE will do a context-sensitive top-screen menubar, it's the "killer app" that's kept me from switching to Gnome on my Linux box.

Re:Konqueror?

[pyros]

and it also acts as a file browser

I've found that the biggest complaint for the integration of the two functions (web and file browsing) is that it's not really configurable to be good at both unless you like the exact same behavior in both, mostly regarding MIME type handling. For example, I want the file manager to open a standalone image viewer when I double-click on an image file, but I want a web browser to just load the picture in browser. The last time I tried KDE (3.5.1 on Ubuntu Dapper) there was no way to set separate this setting for web vs. file. You had to change the preferences everytime you switched from file to web and vice versa. Everybody on #kde and #konqueror agreed that it was the biggest weakness.

Apples and oranges, truly

[SilentChris]

One should also note that the machines they compared didn't even have the same hardware. The Mac is a dual-core 2.16 GHz machine while the PCs were 2.0 GHz. Not to mention discrepancies with hard drive speeds, video cards (including the non-existant XP drivers on the Mac), etc. It's just not a good comparison by any stretch of the imagination.

A more valid comparison would be SPEC tests between the MacBook and other machines. What you'd likely see is, given the same hardware, they perform exactly the same -- which is the point.

As someone pointed out, most geeks would be interested in a box that runs both XP and Mac OS equally well. Apple is in a big transition year: with Vista delayed and the switch to Intel, they finally have means to court a massive number of geeks to their platform. Some random people claiming the MacBook is somehow "faster" than PCs with different hardware damages this. Geeks will look at the specs and know it's not a valid comparison. Mac fans just need to sit tight and let the benchmarks speak for themselves.

Re:Apples and oranges, truly

[saschasegan]

The very good point in your final paragraph is the point we were actually trying to make in our original Gearlog post. Apple makes fast Windows machines, which should be good news for anyone who wants to dual-boot in the future.

But our rather measured Gearlog post didn't get picked up on Slashdot or Digg. The Reg's headline did. Alas, that says a lot for the value of sexing up your headlines, because a lot more people are looking at our work now that the Reg has 'enhanced' it.

Re:Apples and oranges, truly

[n8_f]

And yet the Apple was 37% faster on the Photoshop test against 3 of the laptops. That is much better than the 8% advantage it has in processor speed. And with the crappy drivers, it has one hand tied behind its back. I am very skeptical of that result, but it is possible that further tests will bear these results out.

A more valid comparison would be SPEC tests between the MacBook and other machines. What you'd likely see is, given the same hardware, they perform exactly the same -- which is the point.

Umm, if they were the exact same hardware, then yes, they would perform the exact same. But the point is they aren't the same hardware. If they were all using the same processor then you would expect them to perform similarly on a processor-limited test like SPEC, but the rest of the hardware could have been customized. So some subsystem could perform better and lead to better real-world performance on tests that use that subsystem. As you'll notice, the Acer scored almost the same as the Mac on the Photoshop test. And yet, they use different processors. Is it possible that that test isn't processor-limited and instead stresses some other part of the system? Maybe it is the Acer's better video card, but if the Mac is using generic graphics drivers and getting similar, valid results, it would point to something else. Perhaps they both have 7200 RPM drives. But if they both have that as an option from the manufacturer and the others don't, that has some value. Yes, you can always add one after you buy, but testing manufacturer's configurations is a valid test. The point is that the Macs could be faster than other laptops in real-world XP performance. This isn't an ideal test, but it is an interesting result.

Re:Apples and oranges, truly

[SilentChris]

"And yet the Apple was 37% faster on the Photoshop test against 3 of the laptops. That is much better than the 8% advantage it has in processor speed."

An increase in processor speed isn't going to have a one-to-one correlation with an increase in a photoshop test. I can take out a video card with a 350 MHz clock and put in one with a 400 MHz clock and get a 50% speed boost in some apps. Photoshop is heavily dependent on the speed of the hard drives, so using the processor as a comparison without having matching hard drive speeds is kind of silly.

"The point is that the Macs could be faster than other laptops in real-world XP performance. This isn't an ideal test, but it is an interesting result."

I could take a boutique laptop with roughly the same processor, a RAID 0 hard drive array and a $500 mobile video card and the results could blow away any Macbook. I could then make the bold implication that laptop PCs are faster than Macs. My tests would have the same validity of the referenced article: absolutely none.

It's an "interesting result" only in that people are referencing it. The reality is they took fairly different hardware and came up with an invalid conclusion.

Re:Apples and oranges, truly

[saschasegan]

The conclusion we came to was that Apple makes fast Windows machines, that compete well in several tests with a range of other consumer purchaseable, recently released PCs.

That's very interesting, because it tells folks that they have a good chance of buying machines that will dual-boot the two OSes, getting market-competitive performance in both.

That's never been the case before, and even once Apple went to Intel there were murmurings that either Apple or Microsoft would do something to hurt Windows performance on the new Macs. Our results go some distance towards disproving that.

How is that conclusion invalid?

Re:Apples and oranges, truly

[SilentChris]

Well, what I'm really against is the title of the Register article, which goes out of it's way to make it sound like the Mac was faster than the PCs, which it wasn't.

However, as you seem to be referring to the article it references with the questionable benchmarks (did you write it?), here are my primary beefs:

First off, the Mac platform, as a whole, never really had a problem competiting with the Windows platform on speed. Jobs went out of his way to show benchmark after benchmark comparing the G3/G4/G5 to PCs in various tests (including Photoshop) and it did fine or surpassed on real-world apps.

However, typically the machines he'd compare the Macs with were comparable. Here you have a $3000 laptop being compared with roughly $2000 models. The $3000 model has a faster hard drive, better video card, etc. If you outfit the PCs that were benchmarked in the same way (the PC benchmarks used primarily base configurations) so that it ended up around $3000, I'm sure you'd find they'd greatly surpass the Mac.

However, put that aside for a moment. You say that "it tells folks that they have a good chance of buying machines that will dual-boot the two OSes, getting market-competitive performance in both". I'm not really sure what you mean by "folks" in this context. If you mean the average computer buyer just trying to get some work done, I very much doubt they'd be able to get the system to dualboot given the work required.

But let's say they did. The only test where the machines were truly close was Photoshop. If they could get their system to dualboot, why on earth would the average consumer run Photoshop in Windows? Why wouldn't they run it in MacOS? A great deal of people who work with Photoshop use it on the Mac. The logistics of dualbooting a Mac to run Photoshop on the Windows makes no sense.

On the other side of the coin, I can tell (you as a geek) that Photoshop by and large doesn't appeal to me. The encoder tests are far better indicators of the overall speed of the machine, and on these the Macbook fell short (even with the better hardware). It'd also be nice to see (like I mentioned) some SPEC tests comparing the machines. If the scores are close to identical, it would appeal to me.

And personally, there's only one set of apps that'll really convince geeks that the new Intel Macs are worth it. Games. Sorry, but games are the truest way to stress every single component of machines and also draw geeky buyers (who then make recommendations to the larger community). I didn't see a single game test, and for good reason: without drivers positive results would be non-existant. I can guarantee you that a lot of people will permanently switch when/if they see Spore running at the same speed on a Pro Mac versus a Dell/Alienware later in the year.

No you don't...

[GmanMac]

You don't need any upgrade cause the OS works fine out the box. If you do pay for an upgrade it's a major release with plenty of useable new features, not a 5 year late new bug ridden release that causes more problems than the former bug ridden version does. Or a buggy resource sucking anti-spam/ anti-virus blocker that Adds NO value to your computing experience except to keep the hounds at bay. More importantly you also get a wealth of built in, iLife APPLICATIONS, which are what you have the computer for in the first place (Not an OS, but the apps that run on it). Most people seem to miss the extra value Macs offer by not understanding the added value they get with having all your digital needs meet for free-- iPhoto, iMovie, IDvd, iWeb, Front Row, iMail, iCal, iTunes, quicktime, photobooth, Spotlight, Automator, Bluetooth, etc, etc., included with Mac OS, all tighly intergated with each other and moreover, tighly integrated with Mac OSX. You don't get anything near the quality and useability of those apps on a Dell or IBM or any XP box, you have to pay extra for it.

Re:No you don't...

[j.bellone]

The reason that you do not see any of that software (or as much of that software) on Windows XP is because Microsoft would get slapped with an Anti-trust lawsuit as soon as they did that. Its not because Microsoft can't produce any of that software, but its because they are limited in what they can put into their operating system.

The majority of people do not understand this, and always spout it as a reason why OS X is better than Windows. The truth is you are the person who determines how productive you are on an operating system. For some people (e.g. the vast majority) they don't need to be moving in and out of bash shells, and compiling new kernel releases. They want to ability to have that all "automated" for them. People are inherently lazy, remember?

I use Windows simply because its the most productive operating system for me. I use Visual C++ for school, MASM for school, and various other applications that I would need to spend hours upon hours screwing with WINE with to get running. I don't have that kind of time, and I need it to Just Work. Before any of you complain about Windows not working: This system has been installed, running, and virus/malware free for over a year (Service Pack 2, and GRISoft Virus Scanner). If you know how to properly use your system you won't have problems.

Re:No you don't...

[GmanMac]

So what? The actual reason is besides the point. Fact is you don't get those apps with the WIN OS and you do in OSX--& point I made is valid--they add hundreds of dollars in value to any Apple purchased. Something the average consumer seems to overlook. To try to get equivalent apps in Windows you have to shell out big bucks or go far largely inferior free or shareware, or simply steal it off a bittorent or whatever. Even if you did get those apps they doubtful would be anywhere is good as Apples are anyway. Besides Microsoft has no one to whine to about monopolistic practices --it has succeeded precisely because it is a De facto monopoly with its leveraged stranglehold on WIN/DOS. These monopolistic practices over the last 15 years have so locked the average user into Windows they are scared to even so much as look at other options out there. As an aside it seems like Microsoft is going to put a photo app in Longhorn anyway. So counting Media Player, the new tied in music service, and others, so much for Gates not wanting to be hit with more Anti trust lawsuits. Bet Adobe Photoshop Elements and JASC/Corel are just thrilled.

Re:One Button? Screw that.

[Anonymous Coward]

The MacBook Pro has 79 buttons. You see that row of things with letters and symbols on? That's called a keyboard. You use those buttons to input stuff into the computer. Four of the buttons are used as modifiers. To right click, simply hold down a control key with your other hand while clicking, You don't even have to move the other hand from the keyboard. The fact that you can't work that out is the retarded thing...

Did I miss something in TFA?

[quakeroatz]

I read the TFA, and I read it again. Clicked all the linkage, nothing.

I'm still looking for the Windows XP benchmarks that compare an normal Intel Duo against a Mac Branded Duo. All I see is photoshop benchmarks among 3 Mac branded duo systems, that's it.

Either I'm blind, or the entire premise of this story is based on some dolt who never even read TFA.

Re:Did I miss something in TFA?

[quakeroatz]

Apparently I am blind:x

The Macbook pro w/ 2.16ghz Duo ran a photoshop script in 1:10
The Acer Duo w/ 2.0ghz Duo ran a photoshop script in 1:11

The Mac Duo laptop with a 8% higher clocked CPU ran a benchmark 1.4% faster than the Acer Duo.
If anything, this looks bad for the Mac Duo.
Why is it seeing such a tiny improvement when it is 160mhz faster?

Re:Did I miss something in TFA?

[sl3xd]

Simple: an 8% difference in clock speed doesn't necessarily equate to an 8% difference in speed -- even if everything else is identical. If the Acer Duo were to have a 2.16 chip in it (and I'm sure it will soon enough), the difference in speed between the Acer books would be roughly the same (1.4%)

It's nothing new; a decade ago people were wondering why a 486/50 was frequently faster than a 486DX2/66 -- and it's because the clock speed doesn't tell the whole story, and never has.

Re:Did I miss something in TFA?

[GrahamCox]

Why is it seeing such a tiny improvement when it is 160mhz faster

Perhaps because 160 millihertz is only a 8x10E-11 % improvement.

undecisivness

[lposeidon]

let me try to make sense of all this... there is micosoft, os x and *nix. most of us complain about M$ yet here we are installing xp on a Mac running x86 hardware like its a miracle.. we use os x and *nix to get away from the M$ regime, but here we are doing the opposite. i dont see anyone trying to load xp on the xbox 360 or on the ps2 and praising about that. i understand that we are doing this to prove a point, that it can be done, but, how can a OS run better on a non-native platform? or are we encouraging people to spend $4k on a mac just to run winxp and photoshop because it has better performance??? WTF? not too long ago everyone is praising apple/os x for being the best when it comes to photoshop type uses. but xp on a mac.. thats got to be a joke.

Re:How things change.

[Anonymous Coward]

All DV camcorders in the market use Firewire to connect to a PC (as do all high-end scanners.) Get even a consumer-grade AtoD box for video and you'll find it has Firewire. Like it or not, Firewire dominates these markets and can hardly be called a failure.

As for USB, the original Bondi iMac was the first mass-maket PC to have USB.

Re:Apple no happy

[gnasher719]

'' I'll pay $60 for RAM from crucial and Apple will charge $150 for the same one. ''

That's interesting. I just checked out what memory for the 1.83 GHz Core Duo iMac costs. At the Apple Store, you pay $300 for an upgrade from 512 MB to 2 GB. At Crucial, the 1 GB chip costs $158, so you pay $316 for 2 GB and you can keep a 512 MB chip as a spare.

Are we checking different web sites, are you living in an alternative universe, or are you just making your numbers up?

Good news!

[Cloud K]

Maybe now people can hold back on the old "Macs are nothing special, especially now that they're Intel, they're just pretty (expensive)" bullshit for a little while?

WTF

[kaffiene]

What is it with fucking Mac benchmarks that the ONLY thing EVER reported on in performance tests is Photoshop? Surely Macs are general purpose computers with users who want to do more than run ONE FUCKING APP????

Re:WTF

[nagora]

Surely Macs are general purpose computers with users who want to do more than run ONE FUCKING APP????

This is true; I know many Mac users who also use the Mail app to send each other their Photoshop files.

TWW

Re:WTF

[saschasegan]

No, if you read the Gearlog story we did three benchmarks: Photoshop, Cinebench and Windows Media encode. We couldn't do Sysmark or 3DMark because of the lack of graphics card drivers.

Re:How things change.

[SteeldrivingJon]

"I agree. It does seem like peripherals are a bit slow to come out, but new Dell laptops are also touting ExpressCard so its not like its only Apple (like when FireWire first came out)."

The main issue for Apple isn't the ExpressCard format, it's that Apple went with ExpressCard*34*.

Even if ExpressCard becomes popular quickly, most products will be the larger format, not the 34mm format.

Dual Boot is great, but Duel Boot is better

[demonbug]

Duel Boot would be more fun. Whichever OS boots faster gets control of the system, and gets to "reclaim" the filespace occupied by the other.

I run photoshop ONLY on my laptop

[drhamad]

Laptops have reached a point where they're fast enough for most anything. Heck, if you look at Apple's current offerings, their desktops and laptops use basically the same hardware! (of course, the PowerMac excepted)

Some people such as myself need Photoshop on the go. Others, also like myself, only have 1 license. Third, I have two systems: a Mac mini (G4) and a Thinkpad T40 (1.3 GHz Centrino, I believe). Should I therefore not use Photoshop, since both are (basically - the Mac mini is an iBook) laptops? Should people with iMac's not use Photoshop either, since those systems use Core Duo's?

Low end systems and laptops both passed the point years ago where they were fast enough for almost anything. Sure, Photoshop is faster on a high end G5 or P4 or whatever system, but it's very useable on any modern laptop or low end system.

Re:I run photoshop ONLY on my laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

One Photoshop license allows the same user to install on two (but no more than two) machines - a desktop and a laptop, or an office computer and a home computer (assuming you own both, or your company owns your "home" computer) - so long as they are not used simultaneously. Call Adobe's support line to check.

Why in the world...

[rice_burners_suck]

...would you buy a Mac, which comes with such an elegant operating system, and then install the clunky decrepid piece of junk called Windows on it?

I could understand if VMware worked on the Mac, to run Windows on VMware... I have come to this conclusion because when Windows is in control of your computer, you lose. That's why it's called Windows. It wins, you lose. But when a reliable program is in control of Windows and Windows is not in control, then you win. In such a case, it should be called Losedows, because Losedows loses and you win.

Re:Why in the world...

[kilfarsnar]

Can you really not see the benefit of being able to load the Mac OS and Win XP on the same machine?

Re:Ummm...

[soft_guy]

OK. Please explain why you would want to downgrade your system's RAM?

I'm making the case that Apple should just max out all the ram in all their computers by default. They could probably get a really good price since they would be buying in bulk. It would just make everyone's life easier.

Re:Ummm...

[ceoyoyo]

Because I don't want to pay Apple for it?

Sure, I'd love to live in a world where my new computer had it's ram maxed for free. I don't think it's going to happen though.

Apple IS getting better -- I bought extra memory for my mini from them because it wasn't significantly (not worth throwing away the 512 MB it comes with) more expensive. That hasn't been the case in the past.

Choice is GOOD (when it doesn't cause problems). I quite like not using a one button mouse on my computer too. I think it's great Apple makes one now, but I'll stick to my ten year old Logitech, thanks.

You can max out the memory in your Mac via Apple, and they'll charge you for it. I'm very glad they offer the option for me to go find this commodity piece of hardware elsewhere.

I agree with your point about making the defaults more reasonable, and I think that's what they're doing.

Alienware Aurora m7700

[charnov]

Don't forget the Alienware Aurora m7700 with a dual core AMD X2 chip.

Re:Alienware Aurora m7700

[spookymonster]

It's the same whitebox kit, actually, except Alienware'll charge you an extra $1k for the novelty alien head on the cover (comparing identically configured systems).

To their credit, Alienware also offers 2 cheaper video cards (the Hypersonic kit only comes with the 7800).

Re:How things change.

[quakeroatz]

Apple was the vendor that really caused USB to take off...8 or 9 years ago.
WTF are you talking about? Mac touted firewire as the hot swap connector of choice, they only introduced USB reluctantly after computer hardware makers said collectively "FUCK YOU APPLE, WERE ONLY MAKING PERIPHERALS IN USB".
Then and only then did Macs come with USB, long after it was standard PC issue.

To this day it's hard to find any use for firewire aside from external storage and DV transfers.

photoshop?

[SP33doh]

how about they start running 3dmark and comparing the gaming capacity?

Re:photoshop?

[Script_God]

They don't have proper video drivers yet. They're working on it and should have them working shortly.

Re:photoshop?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are, 12? Some people think there are more to computers than games. Forget games and get laid instead.

Use your computer for something productive to earn some $'s to get the chicks which will get you laid. Playing WOW will get you nowhere.

An explanation

[Captain Tripps]

Say you're applying some filters in Photoshop. And say each pixel requires a whole bunch of CPU instructions to calculate. Then you might have what's called a CPU-bound task. But you know your new MacBook has an upgradable processor socket, so you try swapping in a faster one, and indeed your filters finish faster. Good, you say. Let's try an even faster CPU. And you stick in a really high end chip, but now you don't get any more improvement.

What's going on? Each pixel is still taking the same number of cycles, but those cycles are flying by so fast that the memory bus can't move pixel data in and out fast enough. So the CPU is idling part of the time waiting data to process. The point at which this happens depends on the task. Maybe your Folding@Home client will still be CPU bound with even the fastest process.

Now say you've created a bunch of images, and your boss wants them as JPEGS, instead of PNGs like he told you last week. So you run a batch conversion. These are big files, and your JPEG encoder is really fast, so now it's the hard disk that's the bottleneck. Your conversion won't run any faster on a multi-Opteron server, unless it's got a faster disk. And of course, everyone's familiar with the network being the bottleneck.

Does that make more sense? I guess my point is that upgrading a component will only make things faster if it's the bottleneck. And bottleneck component will be different for different tasks.

Re:An explanation

[modecx]

I get all of that--that's all pretty elementary knowledge. I expect most n00bs would understand these ideas, if the ideas were broken down this far. Hell, even grandma would understand if one were to make a funnel analogy! This is not the source of any perceived frustration! To the GP, I was making light of the nigh-incomprehensibility of his post. If he were actually trying to enlighten some naïve person without prior knowledge the best result would have been a blank stare... But hey, maybe English isn't his primary language, so I'm not faulting that.

To the GGGGP,

"Differences in cache size, cache speed, disk access time, and disk throughput, among other things, would cause two computers with exactly the same CPU, RAM, and bus to run at different speeds. This is part of the MHz myth -- there's more to how fast a computer is than the speed of its individual parts."

Exact Same CPU implies that the cache size, cache speed are the same, as well as the rest of everything inside the CPU module... No? I think it's pretty much a de-facto statement regarding the consumer desktop. It's been a while since I've met a computer with cache outside of the CPU socket, but I know they're doing this with Itaniums and other server architectures like Sun, where they benefit from L4 caches, and IBM even has a virtual L4 cache that robs from main memory in their server line... But none of that applies to the average Intel, AMD, or PPC device.

And let's face it; disk speed or throughput is not usually a significant influence on the speed of a desktop or laptop computer, unless that computer is going to be used for applications that are sensitive to those things... And most applications simply aren't sensitive to disk speed. I can put all of my game files on my 4 drive hardware RAID0 with 10,000 RPM SCSI discs--but most games don't seem to be able to load large levels significantly faster because of it. Firefox doesn't start noticeably faster off of RAID than it does off of a normal 7,200 RPM SATA disc. All sorts of things don't seem to go faster, and it's not obvious that they're CPU or memory bound tasks, either. But I have no troubles moving or copying files locally with great speed, dumping 2GB of image data to a .tiff in no time, doing DV editing, or transferring files over a 1000BT network, all things that are often greatly influenced by drive and memory I/O.

He said, "there's more to how fast a computer is than the speed of its individual parts"... And that's plainly false! It's not like you can hook it up to high-octane electricity from the public utility without letting out all of the smoke! Maybe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts with many things, but that's hardly the case with computers.

Re:An explanation

[Captain Tripps]

I get all of that--that's all pretty elementary knowledge. I expect most n00bs would understand these ideas, if the ideas were broken down this far.

Yeah, I guess I did get a little carried away there. Hopefully it helped somebody, though.

Re:An explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

And let's face it; disk speed or throughput is not usually a significant influence on the speed of a desktop or laptop computer
My main computer being a laptop with a slow disk, I can assure you that it sucks, and that the processor can safely be downclocked with no loss of speed because of that disk. At least I've gained battery time.

Mac?

[brjndr]

Ok, I am probably not the first to think of this, but it just hit me...

Powerbooks have PowerPC processors. MacBook's have Intel processors.

So when the PowerMac's are switched to Intel, are they called MacMac's??

Re:Mac?

[Sjocxjo]

I'd say MaxMacs...

Amen! (from another near Apple zealot)

[King_TJ]

Not only does Apple shortchange everyone on RAM, but it's triply insulting for 2 extra reasons! First, buying more from Apple is always at least 2x the price anyone else charges for the same memory sticks (and half the time, the original Apple RAM isn't even considered as "top tier" as some of the 3rd. party alternatives you can use!). And second, Macs have always been notorious for getting significant performance improvements with more RAM, to the point of maxxing them out in most cases. (Maybe not in the case of the PowerMac G5 where you can go up to 8GB - but in almost everything else they've ever sold.) Windows PCs, by contrast, have barely even felt faster or made much real use of RAM upgrades over 512MB until very recently. Even now, 1GB is usually the "sweet spot" for your typical XP gaming system.

Re:Amen! (from another near Apple zealot)

[vought]

but it's triply insulting for 2 extra reasons

Hunh?

Re:How things change.

[djkuhl]

*Bzzzt* Nice try, but wrong.

In 1996, before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he owned this little company called NeXT. Through this company he developed a relationship with Intel, who were one of the NeXT operating system's chip makers. The next year after Steve's August '97 return, the first new Mac (better known as the original iMac) shipped only with USB. No ADB, PS/2 or any other junker port from the late 80's. I remember many new PCs that my friends brought to college with them still had required PS/2 ports. Around this time Apple also dropped the floppy disk, but had an external drive available via the USB port. Now fast forward through time and you'll also find out that during the second Steve Jobs reign Apple adopted USB and Bluetooth before any other major manufacturer. You see, ever since 1997 there has been a shift to Intel that nobody was really paying attention to until last year.

By the way, Firewire wasn't introduced until after USB was standard on all Macs.

Re:Ummm...

[toddestan]

Why don't they simply equip the PowerMacs with 1 stick of whatever the biggest they can take? That would make them ship with 2GB if I remember my specs right. This would accomplish three things: It would make the amount of ram in their $3000 workstation no longer a joke, it would give someone who buys one and doesn't (immediately) upgrade it a nice amount of ram to use, and it would give the person who is going to max it out a start, as they would already own 1 of the DIMMs they need.

Misleading: 2.16Ghz vs 2Ghz

[Anonymous Coward]

It is important to note that the MacBook Pro runs a 2.16 GHz core duo and the Acer (which was the fastest laptop in PCMag's photoshop test) only runs a 2.0 GHz core duo. IMO, the Acer should be considered a superior design because even with the processor handicap it loses in the photoshop performance test by only 1 second!

So based on the processor configurations, it shouldn't be so surprising that the MacBook Pro beat the Acer; however, it is still in Apple's favor that they live up to their reputation of using high quality components.

-John DiMatteo

Re:How things change.

[toddestan]

Yes, look at the market Apple single handily created by shipping a computer with no legacy ports! Of course tons of new devices sprung up from companies out to money, as suddenly lots of people who went out and bought an iMac also had to got out and buy all new accessories (or atleast USB->[legacy port] adaptors) because their shiny new blueberry iMac was incompatible with just about..... everything. Sure, looking back from 2006 the all USB iMac sure looks peachy, as any geek I know is now surrounded by piles of cheap USB devices. But back in 1998 that really wasn't the case.

Oh yeah, and I'm sure Windows 98 had nothing to do with it either.

Re:How things change.

[drsmithy]

No peripheral manufacturere bothered with making USB devices. After 2 years on the market, there were only 12 usb devices. Then Apple added USB. 6 months later, there were over 400 usb devices.

And you don't think the near simultaneous release of Windows 98 might have had just the slightest impact ?

Re:How things change.

[toddestan]

Well, the original poster was right in some ways. Just add in a "2.0" after every USB. Apple was one of the last to adopt USB 2.0 on their machines, long after it was pretty standard on most new PCs. Why? Because they were too busy pushing FireWire. They only really gave in once it became obvious that FireWire was turning into a niche connector for a small set of devices, while everything else was USB 2.0. Then, not too long after, Apple decided to jump on the USB bandwagon and screw over all the people with the USB1/FireWire Macs by making the latest iPods USB only, effectively leaving them and their non-USB 2.0 upgradable machines out in the cold.

Re:Ummm...

[ceoyoyo]

Sure. So long as you leave me the option to downgrade so I can buy cheap RAM elsewhere. 2GB DIMMS are EXPENSIVE. If you're NOT going to max it out you're much better going with 1GB DIMMS.

See, you can't please both of us at the same time. Which is why options are good.

Re:How things change.

[quakeroatz]

Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2.1 4.03.1212-1214 (4.00.950B) 8/24/96-8/27/97 USB support: yes
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q253756/

When did Macs get USB? Not till 1998 with the iMac
http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=i mac&performa=off&sort=date&order=ASC

You may be confused with ADB vs. USB?
"In my view the bus topology of USB is somewhat limiting. One of the original intentions of USB was to reduce the amount of cabling at the back of your PC. Apple people will say the idea came from the Apple Desktop Bus, where both the keyboard, mouse and some other peripherals could be connected together (daisy chained) using the one cable."

Re:How things change.

[djkuhl]

Umm if you read more carefully you would have been able to grasp that USB hardware was added in to the iMac like I said in 1998. Redundant...

I'm not confused with ADB or USB at all. Apple dropped ADB in favor of USB. Many PC manufacturers had or still have PS/2 in their newest systems. Your statement that a service pack implies adoption means nothing. Few systems supported Bluetooth before Apple had it included standard. Windows OS still struggles with identifying Bluetooth devices.

Mac 2.16 Ghz vs 2.0

[mariogarcia]

According to the test:
  http://www.pcmag.com/image_popup/0,1871,s=1565&iid =127601,00.asp

  -All other laptops used Core Duo at 2.0 Ghz
  -The only 2.16 showed N/A
  -And the difference is only 1 second in the test.

  So this test is inconclusive

Re:Mac 2.16 Ghz vs 2.0

[saschasegan]

No, the test is quite conclusive: the Intel Macs run XP well (or as well as you could expect given no graphics drivers.) That was our conclusion, and I think it's a useful one. It shows that people will, hopefully, be able to run dual-boot systems without making compromises.

All of this OMGWTF!!!??? about whether machine X or machine Y is one.second.faster on one of our benchmarks is pointless. The point is that the MacBook competes well with other currently available Intel laptops.

Sorry if that doesn't help people get their OS/manufacturer/fanboy flamewars up.

Re:Mac 2.16 Ghz vs 2.0

[mariogarcia]

You're completly right, im convinced they are equal, and thats something. I've been quite doubtful about getting a Mac because of some Windows apps I need but with these tests I make mind. I think my comment was biased by the Slashdot headline "AMBP Fastest Win XP?", and I lost focus on the positive results, and that it wasnt your claim anyway, just an observation you did. I think thats quite common in this forum, The headline being a manipulation. Sorry I fell for it.

Re:Mac 2.16 Ghz vs 2.0

[SilentChris]

"The point is that the MacBook competes well with other currently available Intel laptops."

Well, no, it doesn't (at least not the machines you compared). You compared a faster, much more expensive machine versus lesser priced slower machines. If by competing you mean "speed", it's really an invalid comparison because one could just as easily take a 2.16 GHz PC and finds it runs the tests faster than the MacBook. If by competing you mean "price", there is no comparison. The prices are nowhere near equal.

You've got to remember who your target audience is. Your site is supposed to appeal to the tech savvy, the group that skips past http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ and goes straight to http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/whatsinside.html If the numbers aren't exactly equal, you have a problem. You've essentially lost the interest of your target audience and also invalidated your results at the same time.

Battery life

[solarbob]

Whilst its all very nice having these great process which make for desktop replacements I still can't feel there is a market for a 1Ghz laptop, 512Mb RAM, 40GB storage and a good 12 hours of battery life in a relativly slimline case. The Sony TX1's come pretty close with 6 hours but a full 12 hours would mean you could just not have to charge up during a normal working day

Here's $ 9.99, buy yourself a 3-button mouse

[xiaodidi]

Mac OS X runs any 1- to 15-button mouse out-of-the-box. Laptops don't ship with mice anyway.

Re:Here's $ 9.99, buy yourself a 3-button mouse

[Anonymous Coward]

umm.. no. my intel based mac mini only supports the first two buttons on my logitech diNovo mouse. Oh, and none of the media buttons work on the keyboard. Oh, and the 'home/end/insert/delete' keys don't work. Oh, but wait, the drivers exist for OSX, but they won't function on intel-based macs.

Re:Here's $ 9.99, buy yourself a 3-button mouse

[objekt]

Oh, and the 'home/end/insert/delete' keys don't work.

Insert? You aren't using a Mac keyboard. The other keys are standard and work, and who said anything about mac minis anyway (besides you)?

OT: nice signature

[4D6963]

haha I love your signature. Very true.

Like WMD Caches?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those images need to be doctored quick!

Of Mice and Macs

[xiaodidi]

Yeah, I don't believe basic input devices will be a general problem in the PPC-intel transition. Some isolated glitches, maybe.