14 DAY TRIAL // "Macs on Intel: You're missing the point" Paul Thurrott writes for Internet Nexus. The article is surprising in two ways, firstly it is bang on all the talk and babble about the new Macs and the performance and benchmarks, and secondly, it is written by Thurrott.
"There's been a lot of debate about the relative performance of the new Intel Core Duo chips used in the new Apple iMac and upcoming MacBookPro. Most people are missing the point. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs says that the new Macs are "twice" as fast the models they replace, or "4 to 5 times as fast," he's lying, but then we've all seen that before. The point isn't that Apple is once again engaged in a game of exaggeration. The point, actually, is that Apple moved to Intel for a reason. And you're not necessarily seeing that in this first generation of Intel-based Macs," Thurrott writes.
Actually, Steve Jobs was not lying, those were SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) scores. He went out of his way to say exactly that the measurements were for the processor, but that the hard drives and memory would be pretty much the same so the computer is not going to be twice as fast in all tasks. It was twice as fast in the benchmarks used, but benchmarks are benchmarks, and they are not a universal measuring stick. It's not a lie, it's called marketing, and everybody does it.
"Apple moved to the Intel platform because of the future. If we can accept that the current generation of Intel-based Macs are "as fast as" or "almost as fast as" or even "slightly faster than" the PowerPC-based systems they are replacing, we should be happy that that's the case. I had expected to see dramatically better performance (and, in the case of the MacBook Pro, dramatically better battery life) when compared to the previous generation systems, but let's not lose sight of the fact that platform shifts are hard. Apple did it once when it moved to the PowerPC, and it's doing it again. Microsoft is doing it now with x64 and is, in my opinion, not handling it as well as Apple has," Thurrott continues.
This is a big deal, it is a transition. If the non-native applications are working without any perceivable speed hit, what more can you ask for? As more and more applications go Universal Binary, the machine will get faster and faster. It is a forward thinking machine, and it needs to be treated as such. Take a good long look at the comparison made to Microsoft's transition and let it sink in. Apple is doing everything it can. The machines are out, the OS is out, now it's all up to the software developers.
"Like many of you, I get caught up in the wrong things sometimes. The iMac I have performs admirably, though not with legacy games. It will someday run Windows Vista, and I certainly have a dream of dual booting between Mac OS X and Vista. Think about how radically that would alter my work life: Currently, I have to maintain separate Mac and Windows machines. Because I write about Windows for a living, I can't afford to simply drop the platform, and nor would I anyway, because there are certain things about Windows that are obviously superior to what's available on the Mac. But now, or at least sometime soon, I'll be able to run both systems on one machine. That's important to me in a measurable way. And looking forward, those machines are just going to get better and better. And both Windows and the Mac--and their users--will benefit as a result. That's why Apple switched. And that's why you shouldn't get too caught up in unimportant measurements, charts, and anecdotal evidence. The new Macs are better than the old Macs. And they're just going to keep getting better. That's good news, not bad."
There is little to add, Paul Thurrott hit the nail right on the head? The transition is still ongoing, but Apple has done pretty much everything they could on their end, now we just have to wait for the software developers to get their products out.
Glad you are enjoying your iMac Core Duo, Paul.