See here. They ran Word and Excel to see if today's machine is any better than what we had 20 years ago. Money quote: "When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity. And that's just plain crazy."
CORRECTION: The AMD machine in the test was running XP, not Vista. My bad. Sorry.
Friday, June 01, 2007
20-year-old Mac beats brand new Vista machine
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Why does this not surprise me?
Slow news day, Steve-o? Taking a 3 day weekend?
This blog post is like writing about how scientists confirm that "Water is still wet" or "The Sun is still hot"...
To be clear, the article says their AMD machine ran XPsp2, not Vista...tho' I doubt that did anything but help the results. 'Course, I'm not sure what his 'tests' proved. Let's note that the 4mb Mac+ was brutally expensive - maybe $7K in today's dollars - versus, what, a $1200 modern box? And while the Mac was tweaked (max RAM; revised app., etc.), the AMD machine is box-stock and probably suffered for it. Heck, my year-old AMD boots in less than half the time theirs did and I'm no big-time XP whiz. All in all, I'd say it was more a trivial exercise in vanity by a giddy (and aging) Mac fanboy than anything like a valid, clinical comparison.
To be clear, the article says their AMD machine ran XPsp2, not Vista...tho' I doubt that did anything but help the results. 'Course, I'm not sure what his 'tests' proved. Let's note that the 4mb Mac+ was brutally expensive - maybe $7K in today's dollars - versus, what, a $1200 modern box? And while the Mac was tweaked (max RAM; revised app., etc.), the AMD machine is box-stock and probably suffered for it. Heck, my year-old AMD boots in less than half the time theirs did and I'm no big-time XP whiz. All in all, I'd say it was more a trivial exercise in vanity by a giddy (and aging) Mac fanboy than anything like a valid, clinical comparison.
To be clear, the article says their AMD machine ran XPsp2, not Vista...tho' I doubt that did anything but help the results. 'Course, I'm not sure what his 'tests' proved. Let's note that the 4mb Mac+ was brutally expensive - maybe $7K in today's dollars - versus, what, a $1200 modern box? And while the Mac was tweaked (max RAM; revised app., etc.), the AMD machine is box-stock and probably suffered for it. Heck, my year-old AMD boots in less than half the time theirs did and I'm no big-time XP whiz. All in all, I'd say it was more a trivial exercise in vanity by a giddy (and aging) Mac fanboy than anything like a valid, clinical comparison.
'Brand new Vista machine'? As I read it their AMD machine ran XPsp2, not Vista...tho' I doubt that did anything but help the results. Still, I'm not sure what his 'tests' proved. That 4mb Mac+ was brutally expensive - maybe $7K in '07 dollars - and they matched it against, what, a $1500 modern box? And while the Mac was tweaked (max RAM; revised app., etc.), the AMD machine is bone-stock and probably suffered for it. Heck, my year-old AMD boots in less than half the time theirs did and I'm no XP whiz. All in all, I'd say it was more a trivial exercise in vanity by a cynical (and aging) Mac fanboy than anything like an edifying, clinical comparison.
Sorry for multiple posts. Seems this thing doesn't play well with Opera.
are you also saying i should ditch my black macbook on ebay and go to a rummage sale to pick up one of these sleek, mega-fast beige babies?
Clearly the other people making comments here have lost sight of the big picture. If you want a computer for writing and not much more, you're better served rescuing an old Mac from the great Trash can in the sky than you are spending even a single penny on a Windows PC.
I'm old enough to have used MacWrite on a Macintosh 512ke and I found no joy with a 512x342 pixel display. Now change Mac Plus to read Mac IIci with a Portrait display (870x640) and you've got a really serious word processing or publishing box that would really show that Athlon who's boss.
The MacPlus + System 6 + say, Word 5.1a will also kick today's bloated machines in the ass. Nevermind that the Finder is better and snappier than either modern OS.
Zero advance in productivity? No MINUS 1,000% LOSS of productivity!
But, hey, I got work to do, iPods to manage, videos to post...
I'm pretty sure it'd 'beat' a new iMac in those same tests. So you've not progressed at all either, huh? ;)
Actually, here's the REAL money quote:
"After all, most users don't know or care whether their computer has a 65nm dual-core CPU or a tiny midget wizard squatting in their cases."
Lucky they used a svelte operating system like XP instead of a bloated Vista corpse.
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