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May 30, 2007

huh

Mac Plus and AMD Dual Core Athlon fight to the pain

Posted May. 30, ’07, 9:48 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Apple » Huh?

Mac Plus vs. AMD Dual CoreToday is all about battles. Coming up later in the day, we’ll have a recap of the titanic battle royale between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but let’s ease into that with this one-on-one duel. Hal Licino pitted a Mac Plus (circa 1986) against a modern day AMD Dual Core Athlon 64 X2 4800+. Now, in a physical brawl, I’d take the Mac Plus any day: it’s hardy and compact, like a wizened kung fu master. But in a performance shoot out? Much as I love the Mac, an arthritic twenty year old computer couldn’t possibly beat a hard-throwing rookie of the 21st century.

Could it?

The Mac Plus decked the AMD in 53% of tests, including an astounding 11 second boot time, beating the AMD by 52 seconds. Now, we must point out that the tests didn’t focus on the full potential of the modern platform: there are no Photoshop rendering tests, no computer game framerates, not even numbers on web surfing. Instead, Hal tested common tasks (saving, scrolling, zooming) in Word and Excel on both and found that in most cases, the Mac Plus performed faster.

For a conclusion, let’s turn to Hal himself, who I think puts it best.

Is this to say that the Mac Plus is a better computer than the AMD? Of course not. The technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities. But the “User Experience” has not changed much in two decades. Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don’t even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

And that’s just plain crazy.

True enough. So much time is spent focusing on the bullet points of what computers can do that less and less time is spent making those tasks more efficient. Think of the surfeit of processing power, RAM, and hard drive capacity available these days: sure, you can do a lot with them, but it’s constantly taking you more and more time to do those things. Don’t you ever miss the simple days, when computers were more about the tools and less about the lifestyle?

[Hat tip: Peter Cohen]


2 Comments

Fletcher said:

I think these kinds of tests deny a lot of the user interface work which is being done today.

One thing people criticize about the Mac is the speed of the mouse cursor on screen. But, the acceleration of the mouse cursor is carefully controlled so it can be used precisely. It could go faster, but is throttled so it goes fast enough.

Windows do not scroll as fast as possible in Mac OS X, but instead are rendered as an animation with live scrolling. Most people's goal when scrolling is not to get to the end of the document as fast as possible (which can be accomplished with the End key), but to quickly scan the document for an intermediate point. The smooth scrolling in Mac OS X makes this a far more enjoyable process than the jump scrolling in the Mac Plus.

However, I must so those old Macs do boot fast. I think the Mac Plus probably becomes usable after a cold boot faster than my MacBook becomes usable when waking from sleep.

And, I wonder why they compared an old Mac to a new Windows machine. Why not compare with a new Mac. Comparing the Mac Plus with a new iMac would make the most sense.

May 30, 2007 10:16 AM
Walt said:

Speaking of the Steve & Bill match, wouldn’t it be funny if they both step on “stage” and Steve says “Hi, I’m a Mac…” I bet the crowd would die laughing.

May 30, 2007 11:54 AM

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