14 DAY TRIAL // Over these past few days there has been much talk and contradiction over the performance of the new Intel Macs.
There are many benchmarks out there. Some are synthetic, others are more akin to real life tasks, but all they all fail at being entirely relevant. Sure, Jobs said that the new iMacs were up to twice as fast, according to the SPEC scores, and then came a string of reviews and benchmarks each with different results. My question is: was anyone expecting the new iMac to actually be twice as fast as the old one at everything? If so, they seriously need to wise up to the world of marketing. If you see "over 100 pages" written on a magazine, what does common sense tell you? Will the actual number of pages be closer to 199, or 101?
The new iMac represents a bridge, a link in a chain. Apple is moving from one technology to another, a complicated transition that so far is going incredibly well. However, many people are not seeing the big picture and keep sticking to semantics. Furthermore, the consumer mentality is beginning to get the better of many of us. Apple is switching to Intel, not necessarily because Intel chips are a gazillion times faster than the PowerPC chips, but, because, they feel this will open up possibilities further down the road that would be inaccessible otherwise.
The current iMac is superb for what it is. Most of the old software runs at about the same speed, while it is being emulated. If you have ever used VirtualPC to emulate Windows on your Mac, you would know how painfully slow it is, for even the most mundane of tasks. Now take that experience and compare it to the results the iMac has been getting. You ever try applying a chain of filters in a Virtual PC emulated Photoshop? Or doing encoding work? Try that, and then go cry a river about how the new iMac isn't twice as fast.
Apple has done their part, the hardware and system are out, they have been out for some time now for developers, and now the developers need to do their job and get the Universal Binaries out. There is only so much Apple can do, not it is up to the software developers, they need to get the new versions out. And as the new versions come out, they will run natively, and faster, and ideally, be optimized for dual core processors. This is a very rare thing, a computer that, as time goes by, will get faster instead of slower. It is a forward thinking machine. You have to see it in the bigger picture. And you have to see the difference between the hardware and operating system and the software.
Just how fast you expect your word processor to be? How fast do you think you can get? At the end of the day, you will always be limited by the fact that you can only type so fast. All those benchmarks and tests, how many of them were run on applications that take full advantage of multiple processors? And it isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison is it? Mac users, above all else should know this. For years we've had to put up with the Megahertz myth, and PC users laughing at our 1 GHz machines. There is more to a computer than the big number written on the processor.
The transition is happening, and the future is here. And it is called Universal Binary. Frankly I am very curious as to how Apple will play this one out. At the moment, software developers are writing programs that will run on both Intel and PowerPC processors. Will this only be a transitional thing that will eventually go away in favor of all Intel native apps, or will the Universal Binary stick around for some time now, giving Apple the flexibility to change back to the future versions of the G5 if they should ever see any possibility in it? There is no way to tell, but as Apple is Apple, I bet you one jam tart, just like they had OS X running on Intel in-house for many years before making the switch, they will keep it running on G6 or whatever it will be called.
There is no way of knowing exactly what the future of Macs will look like without Steve letting us in on his little secrets, but there is one thing I know, that future begins with the new Intel Macs.