This is pretty predictable. I am very, very glad that this "debacle" happened, because now Apple will take initioative, and actually do something about this.\ 8)
Underclocked Memory on a prehistoric memory subsystem?
It's not underclocked and the only think seperating in from offering AMD like speeds is support for DDR from the MPX controller. It's not as prehistoric as you make it sound
Quote:
Anemic GeForce 4mx Videocard?
The Dual 1.4 uses the Radeon 9000...for a reason. It's faster.
Quote:
Pathetic Onboard Audio?
Why because Apple doesn't support some chincy 5.1 chipset with horrible Signal to Noise? No thanks my DVD player and amp in my living room are fine.
Quote:
90 Day Telephone Support?
We're scraping bottom barrel here.
What I want is
A $1500 PC with
4 "Open" PCI slots. Not 4 before the manufacture stuffs a bunch of crap into them.
Gigabit ethernet. Say what you want it'll be the Desktop standard in 3-4 years.
Easy access case
Must run OSX. Ooops sorry no PCs apply. Thanks for playing.
I know that Adobe is upset about Apple's Final Cut Pro and the built in pdf functionality of OS X, but this is kind of lame. They must know that Apple is getting ready to unleash IBM's PPC 970 chip. With the 970's memory bus feeding the Altivec unit, Photoshop could run an unreal speeds. Why would Adobe invite the wrath of Steve? All it will do is stimulate Apple to produce an alternative to Photoshop and would strike deeply at Adobe's profits. Imagine Apple bringing out a 970 based laptop at some point in the future and comparing Photo editing software applications against Intel and/or AMD based desktops. Intel and AMD might come away smelling quite foul on this one. If Adobe is tying their future to x86, they will lose. Adobe will never again compete with Apple on video editing with the likes of Final Cut Pro on the PowerPC. They have completely lost this market. I don't know for sure, but it would seem that Apple sells far more FCP licenses than Adobe's Premiere. I'm sure Adobe sees that and longs for that market. I sure don't see many folks editing professional video using Premiere on x86 laptops. It is a dead end market. Now Adobe is attempting to shoot the other foot. What will they do if they lose Photoshop on the Mac? Blame Apple, that's what. It is their own fault, but they will pin the blame on Steve. Never mind that Apple is only 3% of the market. Never mind that a program on a platform with 97% market share cannot compete with a program running on a minor platform. I sincerely hope this lights a fire in Apple and Steve brings out a Cocoa version of a high powered Photo editing suite. In fact, perhaps including a low end version for consumers that bests Adobe's finest efforts on x86. If Apple has the nerve to do this against the giant Microsoft with the development of Keynote, they certainly won't hesitate to take on Adobe.
It's not underclocked and the only think seperating in from offering AMD like speeds is support for DDR from the MPX controller. It's not as prehistoric as you make it sound
Excuses don't make it any less pathetic,
Quote:
Originally posted by hmurchison
The Dual 1.4 uses the Radeon 9000...for a reason. It's faster.
$1500 PC's have atleast a GeForce 4200 or Radeon 8500, and often GeForce 4600's and Radeon 9700's
Quote:
Originally posted by hmurchison
Why because Apple doesn't support some chincy 5.1 chipset with horrible Signal to Noise? No thanks my DVD player and amp in my living room are fine.
Welcome to 2003, incase you have not been following the news for the last 5 years, the PC is quickly taking the place of the stereo for alot of customers. One of the first questions typically asked is about the sound hardware. Apple is seriously lacking in this department.
Quote:
Originally posted by hmurchison
We're scraping bottom barrel here.
Hardly, technical support is a very serious concern for many new or unsophisticated computer users, esspecially 'switchers' learning a new platform
Quote:
Originally posted by hmurchison
What I want is
A $1500 PC with
4 "Open" PCI slots. Not 4 before the manufacture stuffs a bunch of crap into them.
Gigabit ethernet. Say what you want it'll be the Desktop standard in 3-4 years.
Easy access case
Must run OSX. Ooops sorry no PCs apply. Thanks for playing.
With the exception of Mac OS X, that isn't a problem.
Dell Optiplex, HP Vectra's and lots of customs PC's can provide all that your asking for. It's not 2000 anymore, Gigabit ethernet isn't that uncommon anymore.
The glory days of the 9600/450 and the B&W G3 are long gone. The G4 stared by stumbling and have then failed for close to 4 years!
I think that the Pentiums beats us fare and square. There is nothing we can do about that as long as Motorola supply the chips. Remember that the fast 604E and fast G3 for came from IBM, still does BTW.
So here we are sitting in the G4 BB gun and Intel is blasting away with the high powered P4 or the double barrel Xeon dual.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel! And it is coming from something big and blue
Mac users are a sensitive lot, and when Adobe posted a link to a published report showing the PC bruising the Mac rather severely in a series of benchmarks, it didn't sit too well. The use of the words "pc preferred" in the URL simply put salt on the open wound.
So what's going on here? Apple touts Adobe software as demonstrating that the Power Mac smokes a Pentium. The latest benchmarks show, for example, that the dual 1.42GHz Power Mac is 32% faster than a 3GHz Pentium 4. Now we're reading about a test showing a decidedly contrary result. What's going on here? Is Apple publishing rigged tests because its processors can't keep up with Intel Inside?
Let's give this whole episode a serious dose of reality. The article Adobe is linking to is old news. It was published last fall in Digital Producer Magazine, in fact. Why has it suddenly become such an issue? Well, first and foremost, the whole subject of benchmarks is like statistics. You can always produce figures that prove your point of view, if you are reasonably selective.
Also, Mac users don't want to hear that their favored platform can't keep up with the competition in every single respect. It just fuels the fire and raises the volume of demands that Apple needs to do something real quick to improve processor speeds.
Let's get back to Apple's own benchmarks. They employ nine Adobe Photoshop filters and a large color image file to come up with those widely published results in which the Pentium is second best. Regardless of what some people think, the filters are actually pretty ordinary stuff, such as resize, rotate and Gaussian Blur. If you run the tests fairly on the same Mac and Wintel hardware Apple uses, not crippling either in any way, you should come up with results that closely match Apple's. I know. I've done it myself on a number of occasions.
However, not all Photoshop filters exploit the advantages of multiprocessing and the Velocity Engine, which means that if they are used, the Pentium might come out on top. What's more, the tests in which the Mac was bested involved small files used by video editors, rather than the large files used by graphic artists. Without knowing the actual setup parameters employed, and that is critical to the end result, I couldn't possibly try to duplicate them.
Regardless, Adobe has, in the past, stated that Power Macs are the fastest at rendering Photoshop. So does this all mean the company has finally changed its mind?
If you look at the published tests closely, you'll also see that the Mac fared worse at Adobe After Effects. This would seem to indicate that we are also dealing with an application specific issue here. In responding to the uproar over these tests, Apple is quoted as saying it is working with Adobe to make the Mac version of After Effects run better. To be sure, Apple's Final Cut Express is said to be faster than After Effects in running a similar set of video rendering benchmarks. Maybe Adobe just has to get is programming act together and optimize its Mac code a bit more.
What's more, a fair conclusion, with one platform leapfrogging the other in any particular set of tests, is that both are plenty fast. You would not seriously expect to buy a Mac to perform some tests, and a PC box to do others, depending on which does the job faster. It's the overall computing experience that counts. Here a poorly designed operating system can bog you down with system-related chores that have nothing to do with your regular work.
This isn't to say that I wouldn't like to see a pair of 2GHz G4s in a Power Mac, or that Apple shouldn't be working on improving logic board performance to eke as much performance possible out of its computers.
But we have to deal with what's here now, and I am not disappointed in the least. I seldom run into situations where I have to wait for my Mac to finish its work. And when the cursor does spin, it gives me time to get up from my chair and stretch my muscles.
I should also point out that Adobe's Web sites also include links to Dell's, to the pages hawking Precision Workstations. No doubt Adobe gets a little commission from the click-through, so it doesn't hurt to tout benchmarks that show the performance advantages of a Dell. Remember, it's still all about money.
Comments
Underclocked Memory on a prehistoric memory subsystem?
It's not underclocked and the only think seperating in from offering AMD like speeds is support for DDR from the MPX controller. It's not as prehistoric as you make it sound
Anemic GeForce 4mx Videocard?
The Dual 1.4 uses the Radeon 9000...for a reason. It's faster.
Pathetic Onboard Audio?
Why because Apple doesn't support some chincy 5.1 chipset with horrible Signal to Noise? No thanks my DVD player and amp in my living room are fine.
90 Day Telephone Support?
We're scraping bottom barrel here.
What I want is
A $1500 PC with
4 "Open" PCI slots. Not 4 before the manufacture stuffs a bunch of crap into them.
Gigabit ethernet. Say what you want it'll be the Desktop standard in 3-4 years.
Easy access case
Must run OSX. Ooops sorry no PCs apply. Thanks for playing.
Originally posted by hmurchison
It's not underclocked and the only think seperating in from offering AMD like speeds is support for DDR from the MPX controller. It's not as prehistoric as you make it sound
Excuses don't make it any less pathetic,
Originally posted by hmurchison
The Dual 1.4 uses the Radeon 9000...for a reason. It's faster.
$1500 PC's have atleast a GeForce 4200 or Radeon 8500, and often GeForce 4600's and Radeon 9700's
Originally posted by hmurchison
Why because Apple doesn't support some chincy 5.1 chipset with horrible Signal to Noise? No thanks my DVD player and amp in my living room are fine.
Welcome to 2003, incase you have not been following the news for the last 5 years, the PC is quickly taking the place of the stereo for alot of customers. One of the first questions typically asked is about the sound hardware. Apple is seriously lacking in this department.
Originally posted by hmurchison
We're scraping bottom barrel here.
Hardly, technical support is a very serious concern for many new or unsophisticated computer users, esspecially 'switchers' learning a new platform
Originally posted by hmurchison
What I want is
A $1500 PC with
4 "Open" PCI slots. Not 4 before the manufacture stuffs a bunch of crap into them.
Gigabit ethernet. Say what you want it'll be the Desktop standard in 3-4 years.
Easy access case
Must run OSX. Ooops sorry no PCs apply. Thanks for playing.
With the exception of Mac OS X, that isn't a problem.
Dell Optiplex, HP Vectra's and lots of customs PC's can provide all that your asking for. It's not 2000 anymore, Gigabit ethernet isn't that uncommon anymore.
I think that the Pentiums beats us fare and square. There is nothing we can do about that as long as Motorola supply the chips. Remember that the fast 604E and fast G3 for came from IBM, still does BTW.
So here we are sitting in the G4 BB gun and Intel is blasting away with the high powered P4 or the double barrel Xeon dual.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel! And it is coming from something big and blue
March 26, 2003
Adobe and the Great Benchmark Hissy Fit
Mac users are a sensitive lot, and when Adobe posted a link to a published report showing the PC bruising the Mac rather severely in a series of benchmarks, it didn't sit too well. The use of the words "pc preferred" in the URL simply put salt on the open wound.
So what's going on here? Apple touts Adobe software as demonstrating that the Power Mac smokes a Pentium. The latest benchmarks show, for example, that the dual 1.42GHz Power Mac is 32% faster than a 3GHz Pentium 4. Now we're reading about a test showing a decidedly contrary result. What's going on here? Is Apple publishing rigged tests because its processors can't keep up with Intel Inside?
Let's give this whole episode a serious dose of reality. The article Adobe is linking to is old news. It was published last fall in Digital Producer Magazine, in fact. Why has it suddenly become such an issue? Well, first and foremost, the whole subject of benchmarks is like statistics. You can always produce figures that prove your point of view, if you are reasonably selective.
Also, Mac users don't want to hear that their favored platform can't keep up with the competition in every single respect. It just fuels the fire and raises the volume of demands that Apple needs to do something real quick to improve processor speeds.
Let's get back to Apple's own benchmarks. They employ nine Adobe Photoshop filters and a large color image file to come up with those widely published results in which the Pentium is second best. Regardless of what some people think, the filters are actually pretty ordinary stuff, such as resize, rotate and Gaussian Blur. If you run the tests fairly on the same Mac and Wintel hardware Apple uses, not crippling either in any way, you should come up with results that closely match Apple's. I know. I've done it myself on a number of occasions.
However, not all Photoshop filters exploit the advantages of multiprocessing and the Velocity Engine, which means that if they are used, the Pentium might come out on top. What's more, the tests in which the Mac was bested involved small files used by video editors, rather than the large files used by graphic artists. Without knowing the actual setup parameters employed, and that is critical to the end result, I couldn't possibly try to duplicate them.
Regardless, Adobe has, in the past, stated that Power Macs are the fastest at rendering Photoshop. So does this all mean the company has finally changed its mind?
If you look at the published tests closely, you'll also see that the Mac fared worse at Adobe After Effects. This would seem to indicate that we are also dealing with an application specific issue here. In responding to the uproar over these tests, Apple is quoted as saying it is working with Adobe to make the Mac version of After Effects run better. To be sure, Apple's Final Cut Express is said to be faster than After Effects in running a similar set of video rendering benchmarks. Maybe Adobe just has to get is programming act together and optimize its Mac code a bit more.
What's more, a fair conclusion, with one platform leapfrogging the other in any particular set of tests, is that both are plenty fast. You would not seriously expect to buy a Mac to perform some tests, and a PC box to do others, depending on which does the job faster. It's the overall computing experience that counts. Here a poorly designed operating system can bog you down with system-related chores that have nothing to do with your regular work.
This isn't to say that I wouldn't like to see a pair of 2GHz G4s in a Power Mac, or that Apple shouldn't be working on improving logic board performance to eke as much performance possible out of its computers.
But we have to deal with what's here now, and I am not disappointed in the least. I seldom run into situations where I have to wait for my Mac to finish its work. And when the cursor does spin, it gives me time to get up from my chair and stretch my muscles.
I should also point out that Adobe's Web sites also include links to Dell's, to the pages hawking Precision Workstations. No doubt Adobe gets a little commission from the click-through, so it doesn't hurt to tout benchmarks that show the performance advantages of a Dell. Remember, it's still all about money.