But look at the price differential!
"Writing for USA Today, Gene Steinberg reports that he compared Photoshop 7 performance on a Power Mac G4 with dual 1GHz PowerPC G4 processors against a Sony Vaio RX690G Digital Studio with a 2.2-GHz Pentium processor. He writes, “In the nine test runs, the Mac came out on top five times, besting the Sony by up to 8.1 seconds. Where the PC emerged victorious, the margin was usually less than half a second. In all, the Mac took a total of 35.5 seconds to complete the nine rendering steps. The PC took 50.1 seconds, making it 41% slower according to my calculator’s reckoning.” [Jul 12]"
Yeah, that's great. Except the dual 1 GHz Mac sells for about $2800 and 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 machines are available for much less than this. (And 2 GHz P4 machines, or Athlon 2200+ machines provide a lot of choices in the $1300-1800 range. Nearly the performance of the $2800 Apple machine at about half the price.)
Apple has a loyal base, but eventually that base is going to balk at paying so much for high end machines.
Apple needs to light a fire under Motorola and IBM to deliver faster CPUs, a la G5s, sooner rather than later.
--Tim May |
