this is somewhat interesting.
I've also made the experience that perceptual responsiveness is not so much based on a geekbench score as we'd like to think.
For instance my ol' MDD (see sig) seems just as snappy in most tasks as my MBP, even though every factor (except the OS) should favour the MBP (CPU, ram, sdd, gpu).
Crazy enough, the basic responsiveness of finder seems to be problematic, as even windows explorer (win XP, virtual) seems more responsive.
But anyway, a geekbench score is not directly related to responsiveness. Geekbench measures how fast your rig will go (which you can exhibit by ripping and converting a DVD), but is not directly related to how fast your rig will turn (switching programs; browsing files etc.).
A part of the problem is snappiness vs. smoothness. Snappy means producing results without wait, smooth means creating a transition between states (with the best intention of clear visualization), which nevertheless creates a hiatus of imperfect resource utilization.
I've seen no data about how much smoothness is built in to Mac OS iterations post-tiger, but I do suspect that Lion (and ML) has a lot of "smoothness" because it just does not feel snappy. A year ago I switched from an i7 iMac (GB: 9717) to a i7 MBP (GB: 9518), to make the new machine faster I installed an SSD. In benchmarks, the new machine was in fact 13% faster than the old (the power of SSD), but perversely it did not feel so. In fact it felt decidedly sluggish. The only possible explanation: Lion (vs. SL).
To continue using the car-analogy: some cars are made for the open road and will take you across the country in no time, while other cars are more suited for traffic in the city.
The crazy aspect of "snappiness" is that a 20% difference in speed has a profound impact on the user experience if the difference materializes when the user is interacting with the machine, and conversely is less acutely annoying when you've asked the machine to do a strenuous task (encoding/rendering etc.) And are already more or less "hands-off".
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Why rip a DVD (and wait forever) when you can download it in three minutes?
4.6 GB in 180 seconds?
That's close to what my high-paid ISP promises, but of course only if the pipe's thick enough all the way.
I'd like to know if there's a normal consumer anywhere who can get a sustained real data rate of 200 Mbps across a sea or ocean. More typically a 4.6 gigabyte download (to northern Europe) from the USA takes around 3 hours. I' ve been told, they could be a lot faster, but that the ocean cable operators offer (consumer-oriented) service providers only low priority and limited bandwidth.
Remember, even clouds are at specific spots.