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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (16669)	8/14/1998 9:56:00 AM
From: Mark Palmberg	Respond to of 213177

...let's get together a betting pool and hire an independant testing lab to make the comparison. Isn't that what Bytemark was? I do have to agree with you to some degree, though. If you're talking about a general definition of personal computing power, the Mac's intuitive feel and ease of use have always made it a much more powerful platform, regardless of Mhz. And I still remember those sweet on-stage demos Steve and (was it P. Schiller?) did that showed even a lowly G3-based Mac beating the s#%t out of a 400Mhz Pentium running those Macromedia clips. I don't care which "objective" test you use to measure performance, that's a demo of real-world applicability, and it rocked my real world quite a bit. Anyway, Apple rules, Compaq drools. (And I wasn't even alive in the 1950's!) Good luck, everyone. Mark

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (16669)	8/14/1998 10:30:00 AM
From: Richard Habib	Respond to of 213177

Roger, I have also heard from Mac consultants in town that G3 233 comparisons with high end PII machines are not that good - - but really - - this is marketing. Since when do you assume any claims in the tech market are absolute truths. Apple has shown in their chosen benchmarks a 40% advantage of PII 400s. That's all that's required to push that point which they should do every chance they get. Will it be disputed - - I have yet to see benchmarks that aren't. The average consumer will not get into the ins and outs of the benchmark test. The PC industry will likely not respond to Apple's ads as Apple is not a threat to them. You may see Pc Mag or someone review the iMac - so much the better, as you say iMac has other attractive qualities which they may very well bring out. As to the benchmarks - that issue can become so complex no one really knows the truth of it. Rich

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (16669)	8/14/1998 12:02:00 PM
From: Robert A. Decker	Respond to of 213177

"Eric, the speed comparison can easily be settled by taking any one of a number of industry standard benchmarks (such as Specmark) or just write a small C program that crunches some numbers in a loop and compare." So you're saying that when you use a computer all you do is run benchmarks? If you're going to compare performance you need to compare it on real-world applications. The programs that you'll use. Spec is not a good measure of this, but is more of an exercise in testing the speed of a computer running Specmark, nothing more. As for your second example, the PowerPC chips have always beat out comparable Intel chips on tight loop programs. Here's how I see things falling out: If you do a lot of 3D work (floating point calculations) your best bet is the 604 class chip (not the G3!). If you do a lot of integer calculations (Photoshop, video, etc) then your best bet is a G3. Not sure what a Pentium class (or Celeron/Xeon/Cerebus... oh wait, that's a comic book) are good for... Perhaps if you buy a good system with a 100 Mhz bus then it may be good for something.

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (16669)	8/14/1998 12:12:00 PM
From: Robert Mayo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

re: "Cooking the books" on performance, here's an article you might find interesting: mackido.com. I doubt any member of the WINTEL empire will seriously challenge Apple's advertising lest someone take a closer look at Intel's claims. Speaking of marketing whoppers, how about the one a few years ago that claimed that, with Windows 95, the PC world had caught, or even surpassed, the Mac in ease of use? It was widely believed and, along with Cupertino management gaffs, nearly buried Apple. Bob

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (16669)	8/14/1998 12:22:00 PM
From: Dirk Dawson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

Maybe you should port PowrSym3 (http://www.osa.comax.com/default.html) to the Mac, so we can get a benchmark you'll believe. In addition to providing an interesting exercise to prove a point, you'd pick up an installed base to sell to that you haven't even considered. Dirk

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (16669)	8/14/1998 12:39:00 PM
From: Eric Yang	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213177

I've been tracking the SPEC benchmarks of Pentium vs PowerPC for for almost two years now. macevolution.com macevolution.com At the same MHz PPC750 and 604e generally scores significantly higher than Pentium and Pentium IIs. The fact that SPEC suite runs on optimized hardware, and is often compiled with special compilers, on top of a lean OS makes it a terrible benchmark for evaluating real world performance. Under ideal conditions with simple problems to solve, a 4th grader can do almost as well as a mathematician. Similarly under ideal conditions with fast main system bus and specialized compilers, much of the superior features of PowerPC (such as larger cache, more register, better pipeline, RISC instruction set, onboard L2 cache tag) becomes less important. In addition, SPEC doesn't reflect the fact that PPC 750 has optimizations for MacOS to allow improved performance of real-world application. Even with all that PowerPC still comes out ahead against Pentium of the same MHz. Eric