They can make back pain marginally better. That's not bogus at all.
The average chiropractor will make you better after two to six weeks of visits.
If you don't go to the chiropractor, your back will take about two to six weeks to get better.
The point isn't whether chiropractors can "make your back pain better". Obviously people visit chiropractors and most of them get better. The point is whether the improvement that you experience is greater than the improvement you would have experienced if you'd done nothing.
Retraction: I was comparing announced list prices 1 month ago, not on-the-street prices today. The Mac Mini is still a hell of a deal, but it looks like a MacBook "Apple Tax" is around 15% over the TravelMate.
Apples seem more expensive because they're made with higher-quality, better-performing parts which are frequently more expensive. Sure a Core Duo Mini is going to cost more than a Celeron Dell, but you need to compare apples to Apples.
Yep, that's what I explained last week. MacWorld doesn't understand that "two equally fast cores" does not mean "twice as fast" when you're running single-threaded applications.
They weren't testing "multi-processing": I.E. processing several movies in parallel. They were testing single tasks without running anything else on the system, which meant they weren't evaluating what you correctly identify as being another valuable benefit of multiprocessor systems.
The Core Duo is about twice as fast because, as Steve said, each core is about as fast as a G5 and there are two of them.
This means that for most tasks which are single-threaded (searching for text in BBEdit) there's going to be a modest or zero speed increase. For those rare tasks that are written to be multithreaded it'll be ~1.8x as fast (thread overhead, bus contention, etc.)
I'm not surprised either by Steve's stated SPEC benchmarks or real world app benchmarks. That's how concurrency works in the real world whether it's on a dual-core Mac running OSX or a dual-core Athlon running Linux.
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They can make back pain marginally better. That's not bogus at all.
The average chiropractor will make you better after two to six weeks of visits. If you don't go to the chiropractor, your back will take about two to six weeks to get better. The point isn't whether chiropractors can "make your back pain better". Obviously people visit chiropractors and most of them get better. The point is whether the improvement that you experience is greater than the improvement you would have experienced if you'd done nothing.
Retraction: I was comparing announced list prices 1 month ago, not on-the-street prices today. The Mac Mini is still a hell of a deal, but it looks like a MacBook "Apple Tax" is around 15% over the TravelMate.
No it isn't. I've actually been tracking the prices since they've come out. Apple sells their MacBook Pro for $1 more than Asus's identical machine. Apple sells its Intel Mini for $77 less than Aopen's identical machine.
Apples seem more expensive because they're made with higher-quality, better-performing parts which are frequently more expensive. Sure a Core Duo Mini is going to cost more than a Celeron Dell, but you need to compare apples to Apples.
Yep, that's what I explained last week. MacWorld doesn't understand that "two equally fast cores" does not mean "twice as fast" when you're running single-threaded applications.
They weren't testing "multi-processing": I.E. processing several movies in parallel. They were testing single tasks without running anything else on the system, which meant they weren't evaluating what you correctly identify as being another valuable benefit of multiprocessor systems.
The Core Duo is about twice as fast because, as Steve said, each core is about as fast as a G5 and there are two of them.
This means that for most tasks which are single-threaded (searching for text in BBEdit) there's going to be a modest or zero speed increase. For those rare tasks that are written to be multithreaded it'll be ~1.8x as fast (thread overhead, bus contention, etc.)
I'm not surprised either by Steve's stated SPEC benchmarks or real world app benchmarks. That's how concurrency works in the real world whether it's on a dual-core Mac running OSX or a dual-core Athlon running Linux.