Moving right along...I tend to see that people on this site back up their opinions (when serious, or trying to make a controversial point) with facts and figures. eclipse525 citing a non-existent and unimportant 800 to 1000 MHz jump was both non-factual and nonsensical. It was not pertinent to this discussion, because such a leap did not occur with the G5.
You want some facts? Or do you want someone to rave and rant over the obvious marketing hype.
1. The SPEC results that Apple is claiming is entirely misleading. The fact of the matter is, the test was commissioned by Apple, AND was not a fair representation of the Dell. Here is an excerpt from Tom Yager's Blog at Infoworld:
"The test results are invalidated by severely lopsided testing conditions. Among them, Apple used a prototype G5 running its special GNU compiler and an unreleased version of OS X. The Dells used shipping hardware, vanilla GNU compilers and Red Hat 9.
None of this would be a problem if Apple and Veritest didn't claim the tests were objective. A vendor expects commissioned testing to conclude that the vendor's equipment is superior. I would expect this if I were a vendor, and I wouldn't publish results that put my product in a bad light. But I would examine the positive results closely to ensure that they would stand up to scrutiny. Neither Dell nor Intel will have trouble knocking holes in this report, if they don't simply ignore it because it was a commissioned test.
An apples-to-apples test, so to speak, would require that Dell, like Apple, be allowed to tune its systems and software for best-case performance. Dell's published results on the SPEC site--regarded as the definitive repository for SPEC results--are best-case. They're far better than the results cited by Veritest in the Apple report. That bit takes no special knowledge to ferret out."
2. The G5 is WAY overpriced if you look at comparable machines that are arguably faster than the G5 under fair testing conditions. (Dell Dimension 8300)
What else is there to oogle over? We can say it is sexy. We can say that Apple spent a lot of time engineering this machine. We can say that it will be a solid computer (I don't argue with that). But as for it being the biggest and the best, (and claiming that before the majority of us have even used it) I doubt it or better yet, I will wait and see before I get excited. The truth of the matter is, whatever way you look at it, Apple is catching up (Not to say that Apple can't or won't surpass Dell's in the future).
As for me, I will pay attention to the Apple Hype when thy show a little integrety.