Mac OS X Intel Developer Box Feedback

[rand()]

It would be a pity to see Mac OS X go down the same road IBM's OS/2 went.

I agree with the sentiment. But I think there's one key reason that simply won't happen.

Apple's software.

Yes, IBM had its own software that only ran on OS/2. Can my mom name one of them? Nope. (In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with an OS/2-only app that isn't a developer tool.)

But she knows iPhoto. And that'll never run on Windows short of a rather large compatability layer being written (probably by a third party) for Windows.

There are tons of Apple products that get us Mac fans to buy Apple, both at the pro end - Final Cut, Logic, Motion - and the consumer - iLife, iWork, etc. And once switchers use these products, they typically aren't going to be switching back to Windows versions that aren't as well integrated or easy to use. In fact, Windows applications running would simply be a niceity until those dev's finally start making real, native versions of their programs.

Of course, the latter wouldn't happen at all unless there was a real gain in market share. And even if there isn't, there's no way that we true Mac fans are leaving OS X for Windows the way that OS/2 users eventually trickled away to Windows.

Anyway, that my opinion. Of course, having smooth windows compatability also leaves the door open to a number of virus vulnerabilities and spyware, but that's an issue I think Apple can handle relatively smoothly, if they choose the compatability path. Otherwise, you'll simply see a blazing Virtual PC, where vulnerabilities already exist and are relatively contained.

-rand()

 

[nagromme]

I completely agree, i was about to buy a powerbook, but I'm starting to think i should wait, see what apple comes up with in the next few months. However, i read a report somewhere that said that Apple would continue making PPC for a year or two more, this would not be good... anyone have any ideas?

Yes, I do

1. It's ALWAYS best to wait for any computer product if you can. They always get better and/or cheaper with time.

2. If you know a BIG improvement is on the way (like now with Apple laptops especially) then waiting is even more advisable.

3. But you can only wait so long. Waiting means you give up what you WOULD have done with the machine sooner. What will you do with a PowerBook this year that would be lost to you by waiting? You have to weigh that and make the move when the timing is right for your needs. Whatever you get will be a big step over whatever older machine you use now, and no matter what, something better will come along afterwards. That's life.

4. Buying one of the "last" PowerPC Macs (they'll keep making some models right into 2007) has little foreseeable downside. Eventually, some apps may not run it... but that's true of ALL computers, not matter what the chip. My G4 doesn't run things a faster G4 would run. Etc. etc.

5. Buying one of the FIRST Intel Macs does have two downsides: Downside 1) It's version A product, and those tend to have higher problem rates than an "older" proven design. Apple has the best hardware reliability in the industry... but it's a bad industry! Waiting for version B--or buying what's out now--is in many ways safer. (Yes, you have warranty--but problems are still a big inconvenience at best.) And downside 2) Some apps will not be ready for Intel at first. They may or may not be important to you--and even if they are they may run in Rosetta--and may even run well. But it's still a question mark which PowerPC buyers don't have to think about.

My own conclusion: I need a PowerBook but I'm gritting my teeth and waiting for Intel! My current 1.25GHz PB still runs fine after all.

Intel PowerBooks will NOT be out in the next few months, though. They MAY be out very early next year (I'm hoping for MWSF) or they may take months longer. But there is likely to be another G4 (remote chance of G5) update this year, not an Intel update.

Still, any update is nice if you can wait for it. (And if for some reason there is none, then special deals are likely--so you still win if you can hold out a little.)

 

[illumin8]

Most PowerMac users care absolutely nothing about Doom 3 benchmarks and a whole lot about the performance of their video and graphics editing speed. And largely, PowerMacs soundly beat Intel based machines at Photoshop and video editing, especially if you compare Final Cut to After Effects/Premiere. This is where the speed matters to PowerMac buyers, not games.

The problem with Doom 3 isn't the processor speed, it's the speed of the graphics drivers and the non-optimal intel endian code in Doom 3. It just doesn't run well on the G5.

And I think if anything can be made from these reports, it's that when OSX is running intel optimized graphics drivers, the visible impression of speed - "Teh Snappy" - is more evident. This is because the majority of the work that goes into producing graphics drivers is to get optimal speed out of the Intel architecture, not PowerPC.

Otherwise it would be extremely hard to believe that somehow code running on OSX, compiled in GCC 4.0 for Intel has suddenly opened up a lead where a single Pentium 4 is running quicker than a Dual G5. Every single benchmark in the last few years has indicated you need a Dual Opteron or Xeon to get close to the G5 PowerMacs. And that's usually in benchmark wars with Windows where the MS and Intel compiler is a lot more efficient than GCC.

The anecdotes given of boot times, web pages 'snapping' to the screen as fast as IE6 on windows are simply useless. How often do you boot your Mac? Once a month? Once an update? and Safari 2.0 beats IE6 most of the time in my tests so that's not really a metric I'm impressed with.

Sorry, but it sounds to me like this is pure spin.

You have a valid point on the Doom 3 benchmarks. I was just using that as an example because most games tax both the CPU and graphics chipsets pretty heavily, so they are a good overall measure of system performance, whether you game or not.

Regarding the allegation of this being "Spin", I think you have to look at the source here. If this was coming from Intel employees or fanboys, I think you'd have a valid point, but this is coming from Apple Developers. These are not the type of people to be Intel fanboys. Anything but. These people are using the systems on a day-to-day basis, and if they say it's faster than a PowerMac dual 2.7 for ordinary tasks, I believe them. Remember that very few tasks on the Mac are multi-threaded, so single-threaded performance is going to be king when it comes to most of the iApps + the OS itself. I think this article is just generally drawing attention to the fact that these systems are fast, and yes, we have been misled by the RDF and mystique surrounding the PowerPC ISA. I'm not saying Apple lied, just that they used benchmarks selectively, which all companies do.

Somebody said something like "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Well, there are lies, damn lies, statistics, then there are benchmarks...

 

[pubwvj]

What seven year old application do you have that you want Apple to support classic for??!! I don't think a 7 year old OS should be emulated...

You do not have a very good concept of legacy systems. Perhaps you're too young to remember more than seven years back. I have quite a few 17 year old applications that have hundreds of megabytes of date associated with them that I need to still use. I have gigabytes of publications that were produced in older formats by software that still only runs in Classic. Many other businesses and publishers are in the same boat.

Apple is making a serious mistake if they abandon Classic. I won't abandon my accumulated data (work of decades). Neither will other people. If Apple won't make new hardware and operating systems that continue to support the older applications then they are losing sales.

The real question is why do you feel threatened by someone else's software choices...

 

[nagromme]

This report at AI is nothing to get ecstatic about OR angry about. It's not "spin" or "lies," and it's certainly not "benchmarks."

It's an INFORMAL report of what people have found, using Macs that are not--and never will be--sold to the public.

That's interesting--and perfect for a rumor site. But if you have strong feelings about the report, you may be making too much of it. It's just a tidbit of interest. I enjoyed reading it, and found it encouraging, but it's no more than that.

 

[law guy]

Less than 10 seconds to desktop from the apple, the observer notes...

I see a blip of an apple and then my desktop comes up on a dual G4. But maybe this developer previously had a G3 so the P4 seems fast.

Perhaps I'm just a bit dower today, but I don't see anything exciting about a long-pipeline-for-a-MHz-number p4 vs. current hardware. Hopes for what Intel does down the road b/c I hope the hardware will be as good as it is today for Macs, but right now, seems like a step backwards.

 

[Peyote]

By the way...as I recall, Apple has already written software for the PC, iTunes....maybe it wouldn't be so hard to build OSX to run PC apps because of this fact.

Now whether or not they should is another matter.

 

[rendezvouscp]

This is the whole point I'm trying to get to. Apple distorts benchmarks. They have done this for years. Sure, I can show you a benchmark of Altivec-optimized photoshop plugins where a G5 absolutely spanks any P4. But the truth of the matter is that for almost all purposes, whether it's web-browsing, document creation, listening to iTunes, pretty much anything but Video/Audio encoding, the P4 is faster.

I should point out that you never qualified your original argument by saying "after 6 months to a year when the registry gets bloated". Everyone that uses Windows knows this; that's just a limitation of a poorly designed OS.

But it will be fun to see all of the PowerPC zealots eat crow when the first dual-core Yonahs hit the market and are benchmarked against PowerPC products running the same apps.

I don't think that Apple actually distorted their benchmarks. Sure, they selected the ones that the G5 could shine through, but that's not distorting the benchmarks.

I would consider myself a power-user on a very general basis that I usually have about ten apps open, and they most likely include a video and photo-editing programs (read: I use my mac more than the average computer user). Yes, I care about how well my PowerMac performs in simple tasks, but as a power-user the most important thing to me is how quickly QT can encode video, how smoothly I can see real time effects, what kind of media I can work with, and how quickly effects apply to media. For me, everything is generally snappy enough so I don't really notice any general lag. Remember: you get used to your computer's speed, and your body learns to work at that speed and nothing higher until you work on a faster computer.

I agree with the sentiment. But I think there's one key reason that simply won't happen.

Apple's software.

Yes, IBM had its own software that only ran on OS/2. Can my mom name one of them? Nope. (In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with an OS/2-only app that isn't a developer tool.)

But she knows iPhoto. And that'll never run on Windows short of a rather large compatability layer being written (probably by a third party) for Windows.

-rand()

I think you're right, but I'm still afraid of things going south, even though my fear is not really based on reality. Thankfully, I can depend on people like our parents who like the Mac because of the software and beautiful hardware, not what's on the inside.
-Chase

 

[Jon the Heretic]

Classic

Personally I don't want a Mac that runs programs 35% slower than they do on my current one. I think Apple has a ton of work to do and these new mactels are going to be a hard sell initially unless they are DP 5Ghz dual core chips or something. I'm in no hurry to ditch altivec or my classic apps. I think Apple should make sure these can run classic. I mean my G5 runs Commodore 64 software. OS9 will be a 7 year old OS by the time the PowerMac wintels ship.

I won't buy a Mac that won't run my software. Software emulation is acceptable however. Macs are expensive and I can't justify buying a lot of new software just because I bought a new computer. That is effectively being hit by a double cost whammy---both new hardware, and new software. It is very punishing to middle-class consumers. Backwards compatibility softens the blow.

While I strongly prefer Mac OS X to Windows, I find Microsoft's backwards compatibility (through emulation APIs btw) to be vastly suprior to Apple's. I can run DOS binaries on XP and they work great. Win16s work amazingly well on modern XP systems, a transition from a crappy 16-bit API on a crusty DOS-based OS to the modern 32-bit XP system based on NT. It is a wonderful thing, and completely transparent to the user.

Classic, to be frank, on current PPC is pretty anemic in comparison, and being a separate/optional install makes it rank pretty much near the bottom in terms of ease of use. For example, my parents just bought an iMac G5 and wanted to run their software that ran on their iMac G3 under MacOS 9.x. Boy, were they pissed when I told them they had to spent another $300 for yet another version of MS Office when they were happy with Office 2001, if they wanted it to run natively. My father was so angry he was ready to return it and buy a PC if he had to buy new and expensive Office software anyway. I had to talk him out of it. They elected to wait 2 months -- with the new G5 sitting on a shelf unused in the corner; what a waste -- until I eventually came the 700 miles for a planned visit and could install MacOS 9.x so they could run Office.

Classic could be loads better than it is; it is not the "impressive achievement" I have heard other blather on about. But much of its problems simply lie with Apple's arrogant attitude towards backwards compatibility. Classic's pathetic ease of use, I am certain, has more to do with attitude than with cluelessness. Apple I suspect sees software obsolescence as driving hardware obsolescence and that as helping THEIR bottomline. It is a very consumer unfriendly strategy deserving of a middle-finger salute.

But as weak as it is, it does (mostly) work, as long as you are computer savvy enough to jump through the hoops (alas, I had to jump through the hoops for my folks) and should be retained in the new Intel systems in some fashion. Some of my older Classic software is simply irreplaceable, and I don't see the point of buying a slick new computer like the elegant Mac mini or iMac G5 and having to stick another older klunky box right under it just to run software which was designed for the Mac but no longer fit Apple's grand forced upgrade strategy...especially when I can run Windows apps under emulation and even Apple // under emulation...just not, uh, Mac software...hmmm...

Remember when Apple cried that supporting pre-G3 hardware with MacOS X was simply too hard? A lot of Mac users believed them. Interestingly, a Canadian lawyer wrote XPostFacto in his spare time that supports nearly all the hardware Apple dropped with the official X release and it works quite well! I have a 7600/G3 running Panther that has never crashed! I guess Canadian lawyers are just smarter than Apple programmers.

Classic for MacIntel-- too hard for Apple, too, I bet...Apple had the classic MacOS running on Sparcstations...I used it. It was the basis for Classic on PPC. And they had "Star Trek" on Intel too... And Basilisk II, an open source Mac 68K emulator works pretty well on Intel. Alas, Apple's copyrights makes open source Classic PPC emulation tough or the open source community would have tackled it by now. If Apple really believes this is too tough for them, or cares too little for it as I suspect they do, they should simply open source Classic and MacOS 9.x and let the open source community and some Canadian lawyers create Classic-on-Intel for them. If MacOS 9.x is the worthless old OS many of you say it is, what's the loss to Apple? Later, Apple could always rebundle open-sourced Classic with the MacOS X for Intel like so much of the open source software already part of X.

...or they could just hire a part-time Canadian laywer to do it right the first time ;-)

 

[Jon the Heretic]

Hear, hear

You do not have a very good concept of legacy systems. Perhaps you're too young to remember more than seven years back. I have quite a few 17 year old applications that have hundreds of megabytes of date associated with them that I need to still use. I have gigabytes of publications that were produced in older formats by software that still only runs in Classic. Many other businesses and publishers are in the same boat.

Apple is making a serious mistake if they abandon Classic. I won't abandon my accumulated data (work of decades). Neither will other people. If Apple won't make new hardware and operating systems that continue to support the older applications then they are losing sales.

The real question is why do you feel threatened by someone else's software choices...

Hear, hear! You are my new god!

 

[AltiVec guru]

Less than 10 seconds to desktop from the apple, the observer notes...

I see a blip of an apple and then my desktop comes up on a dual G4. But maybe this developer previously had a G3 so the P4 seems fast.

Perhaps I'm just a bit dower today, but I don't see anything exciting about a long-pipeline-for-a-MHz-number p4 vs. current hardware. Hopes for what Intel does down the road b/c I hope the hardware will be as good as it is today for Macs, but right now, seems like a step backwards.

Hard drive speed has a lot to do with boot times, so these "benchmarks" are bogus. If the same HD mechanism were used to boot each system for comparison, then it would add some validity. Also, it's not the time from Apple-icon to Desktop that matters; it's from the power-up chime to the time when the Finder (or first app) becomes responsive to user input, ie double-click the boot volume icon in Finder, and stop the timer as soon as it appears (with contents).

Overall, the Dual 1.42 G4 is one of the fastest Mac's ever built. It has the largest caches ever offered, combined with the best AltiVec performance. My Dual 1.42 G4 (with 2 GB ram and RAID-0 boot volume) launches noticeably faster than a "stock" Dual 2.7 G5, and nearly three times as fast as a single 2.0 G5... yet the G4's front-side memory bus is 8 times slower than the 2.7 G5, and 4 times slower than the 2.0 G5.

The Intel machines are comparable to a G3. How do you think a 3.6 GHz PPC 750 G3 Mac would fare against the G5's, much less a P4?!! My guess is that the G3 would smoke the P4, at equal bus/CPU clockspeeds.

__________________
Dual 1.42 GHz G4, 2GB, 15k U320 RAID-0, ATI 9000, 3x 20" Apple MS
20" iMac 2.0 GHz G5, 1 GB, 400 GB SATA, ATI Pro 9600XT
Dual 500 MHz G4, 1.5 GB, 10k U160, GeForce4 MX and ATI Rage Pro AGP
B&W G3 550 MHz, 1 GB, 15k U320 and 10k U3 RAID-0, ATI 7000 PCI
PowerBook G4 800 MHz, 1 GB, ATI 7500
Developer Transition System

9600/350 469 MHz G3, iMac 233 G3 rev B 256 MB, 8100/80av 300 MHz G3, PowerBook Duo 2300, 4x SGI Indigo Elan 4000, 2x Apple IIgs, 2x Apple //c, T/S 1000, HP 41CV

 

[law guy]

Hard drive speed has a lot to do with boot times, so these "benchmarks" are bogus. If the same HD mechanism were used to boot each system for comparison, then it would add some validity. Also, it's not the time from Apple-icon to Desktop that matters; it's from the power-up chime to the time when the Finder (or first app) becomes responsive to user input, ie double-click the boot volume icon in Finder, and stop the timer as soon as it appears (with contents).

Overall, the Dual 1.42 G4 is one of the fastest Mac's ever built. It has the largest caches ever offered, combined with the best AltiVec performance. My Dual 1.42 G4 (with 2 GB ram and RAID-0 boot volume) launches noticeably faster than a "stock" Dual 2.7 G5, and nearly three times as fast as a single 2.0 G5... yet the G4's front-side memory bus is 8 times slower than the 2.7 G5, and 4 times slower than the 2.0 G5.

The Intel machines are comparable to a G3. How do you think a 3.6 GHz PPC 750 G3 Mac would fare against the G5's, much less a P4?!! My guess is that the G3 would smoke the P4, at equal bus/CPU clockspeeds.

I see this is your first post - welcome to MR.

 

[nagromme]

I can run DOS binaries on XP and they work great. ... It is a wonderful thing, and completely transparent to the user.

All that backwards compatibility is vital to Microsoft keeping their monopoly--and if/when Longhorn breaks too much of it, it will be a big business risk they are taking. But that compatibility comes at the expense of legacy bloat, layers of needless software complexity, and thus reduced stability.

It's two different strategies, not some evil scheme by Apple to make us throw away our Mac Pluses. Sometimes a "fresh start" makes a BETTER product--and Apple has pulled off such jumps in the past. Macs and OS X are the better for it. You can't compare what MS did with 16-bit to 32-bit Windows, because MS has never pulled off an OS transition like OS 9 to OS X/UNIX was.

You may prefer Microsoft's layers-on-layers Rube Goldberg approach, but I prefer Apple's willingness to move forward.

Classic .... being a separate/optional install makes it rank pretty much near the bottom in terms of ease of use. For example, my parents just bought an iMac G5 ... Boy, were they pissed when I told them they had to spent another $300 for yet another version of MS Office when they were happy with Office 2001, if they wanted it to run natively. My father was so angry he was ready to return it and buy a PC if he had to buy new and expensive Office software anyway.

And what would that PC + buying Office have done for him, that the G5 + Office would not? And you say your parents left their iMac G5 unused for months until you installed Classic Office for them. If there was NOTHING else they wanted a new iMac for, why didn't they just keep their old iMac?

And an optional install for Classic makes excellent sense: it's something most people don't use. It shouldn't clutter people's hard drives unless they need it. But the option is there.

Classic could be loads better than it is; it is not the "impressive achievement" I have heard other blather on about. But much of its problems simply lie with Apple's arrogant attitude towards backwards compatibility. Classic's pathetic ease of use, I am certain, has more to do with attitude than with cluelessness. Apple I suspect sees software obsolescence as driving hardware obsolescence and that as helping THEIR bottomline. It is a very consumer unfriendly strategy deserving of a middle-finger salute.

I have no problems with Classic. I even play 3D games with it. "Pathetic ease of use?" It's entirely transparent.

Classic is now 5 years old. It will be SEVEN years old when Apple stops selling PowerPC Macs (of decreasing variety) that can run it. So if you insist, you'll be able to have a Mac two years NEWER than any available today, and STILL run whatever Classic apps you find "irreplaceable." Possibly even in Leopard, and certainly in Tiger.

You say Apple deserves the middle finger because, in 2008, you won't be able to buy Macs that run software discontinued in 2000?

Seriously? Even when Apple's OS strategy lets them innovate instead of being mired in legacy code?

I would suggets the following for those old apps:

a) Direct your anger at the software developers who refuse to update apps you depend on for 8 years. It's equally useless, but more fair.

b) Keep your current Mac. Or a PowerPC Mac you buy next year. Or the year after that. But don't jump to Intel Macs. They're not the best solution for your needs. You're in a tiny minority, however.

 

[Eric5h5]

Classic for MacIntel-- too hard for Apple, too, I bet...Apple had the classic MacOS running on Sparcstations...I used it. It was the basis for Classic on PPC. And they had "Star Trek" on Intel too... And Basilisk II, an open source Mac 68K emulator works pretty well on Intel.

Works pretty well on PPC, too, minus the JIT emulation, which means it's rather faster on Intel. (Even so, it's faster than any real 68K Mac on my 2.5GHz G5.)

Alas, Apple's copyrights makes open source Classic PPC emulation tough or the open source community would have tackled it by now.

You don't know about SheepShaver? Or MacOnLinux? Copyrights have zero to do with anything here; not sure what you meant by that. And they work great! Particularly MacOnLinux; more compatible than Classic, minus any hardware acceleration for graphics. But it's a little fiddly on OS X still, and doesn't work at all on G5s yet. And only SheepShaver works on x86 as well as PPC; MOL is PPC only. It wouldn't take much to port SheepShaver to x86 OS X. Currently it supports up to OS 9.0, and works pretty well with OS 8.6, which is what I use with it.

--Eric

 

[bug]

it is only a performance crisis if you compare a 1 inch thick PB with 4 hrs battery life to a 3GHz Intel 2.5 inch brick with 90 min battery life. essentially you're comparing a desktop replacement to a highly mobile machine.

This statement clearly shows that you haven't been paying much attention to the Intel mobile line. Their mobile processors are both faster and have longer lasting batteries. I have a PB, and there's no way in hell its getting 4 hours of battery life.

 

[AltiVec guru]

I see this is your first post - welcome to MR.

Thanks! I've lurked here for a long time...

 

[Goliath]

You do not have a very good concept of legacy systems. Perhaps you're too young to remember more than seven years back. I have quite a few 17 year old applications that have hundreds of megabytes of date associated with them that I need to still use. I have gigabytes of publications that were produced in older formats by software that still only runs in Classic. Many other businesses and publishers are in the same boat.

I don't have a good concept of legacy systems either! What software package from 17 years ago can possibly compete with today's modern programmes? Simple text is more advanced than some legacy DTP from that era. And surely the files created by such software should be able to be read by modern programmes and updated??

That's one of the reasons Windows is such a mess because it has to support legacy code. I still laugh when I see PC's installed with floppy drives! What's the point...oh I can store 1mb on a floppy!!! Yeah and I can store 1GB on my thumb drive

Computers and software are fast changing- move with the times!

 

[alawrence101]

The first Mac systems to sport Intel processors are expected to hit the market around the middle of next year according to statements made by Apple, though recent mumblings indicate that the company may be striving to beat those estimates by several months.

These aren't even the machines that will be released next year, so the talk about relative speed doesn't strike me as very meaningful. Quoted above is the part that interests me the most. I had heard about the "middle of the year" stuff, but I hadn't heard anthing about the "mumblings"... Has anyone heard this speculation about Apple getting them on the market a few months early? Links?

In case you couldn't tell, I'm planning on being one of the early adopters.

 

[andiwm2003]

This statement clearly shows that you haven't been paying much attention to the Intel mobile line. Their mobile processors are both faster and have longer lasting batteries. I have a PB, and there's no way in hell its getting 4 hours of battery life.

how much are they faster and how expensive are 1 inch thick notebooks?

i agree that the ibm's have more power and more battery life. but thats still far from a crisis. especially since a ibm with the specs of my PB is not cheap afterall.

again, improvement is needed, but no crisis.

 

[fulmer]

This statement clearly shows that you haven't been paying much attention to the Intel mobile line. Their mobile processors are both faster and have longer lasting batteries. I have a PB, and there's no way in hell its getting 4 hours of battery life.

I've got a 1.6Ghz Pentium M notebook and it NEVER lasts more then 2.5hrs on battery. It's got a 12" screen and I usually turn the backlight down to min. All this fluff about how Pentium M gets so much better battery life then the G4 is nonsense. I've also got a 1.33Ghz 12" Powerbook. The battery life is comparable to my work machine. Granted, the PB isn't quite as powerful as my work machine, but it's not a dog either!

 

[steve jr.]

And, when do you guys/gals think we'll see the first Intel-based Macs, specifically the PB's.

Because the PB's haven't been updated in such a long time, except for the occasional .2 or .5 GHz upgrade, I would like to think that they would be one of the first for the upgrade. The same with the eMacs. And possibly at the same time a PowerMac to cover the desktop and portable market in one fell swoop.

 

[freiheit]

porting apps from Windows - x86 optimization and levelling the playing field

It would seem to corroborate Hannibal's assertion that code optimized for PowerPPC was due to reduce memory footprint than to improve performance. So if this were the case, Mac OSX Intel binaries could see better performance and low memory footprint.

In my experience, Mac apps generally load and run pretty darned fast anyway, so if they're optimized for size rather than performance, it would appear the hardware really is incredibly fast to make up for it.

Of course, now when apps get ported from Windows to MacTel they should be able to reuse a lot of the x86 optimization the Windows versions already have (so framerates in 3D shooters will probably go up for Mac users for instance). Should level the playing field (pardon the pun) a bit.

 

[AidenShaw]

how are you using it?

I've got a 1.6Ghz Pentium M notebook and it NEVER lasts more then 2.5hrs on battery. It's got a 12" screen and I usually turn the backlight down to min. All this fluff about how Pentium M gets so much better battery life then the G4 is nonsense. I've also got a 1.33Ghz 12" Powerbook. The battery life is comparable to my work machine.

A couple of YMMV comments....

• How old is it? A 1.6 might be one of the early systems, which would mean that its batteries are at the end of their life. (I have a 1.7 that I bought as soon as the 1.7 was released, and my original two batteries have died due to old age).
• How are you using it? The Pentium M gets great battery life if you're reading mail, surfing, or taking notes during meetings (I can do a full day of meetings on a dual-battery Dell D600 (main battery, and a second in the bay. Remember bays?)
  
  On the other hand, if I hammer it with work it'll drain both batteries in 2 1/2 or 3 hours.

Nobody who's really looked at the details will believe that a G4 PB will match a Pentium M for battery life....

 

[fulmer]

A couple of YMMV comments....

• How old is it? A 1.6 might be one of the early systems, which would mean that its batteries are at the end of their life. (I have a 1.7 that I bought as soon as the 1.7 was released, and my original two batteries have died due to old age).
• How are you using it? The Pentium M gets great battery life if you're reading mail, surfing, or taking notes during meetings (I can do a full day of meetings on a dual-battery Dell D600 (main battery, and a second in the bay. Remember bays?)
  
  On the other hand, if I hammer it with work it'll drain both batteries in 2 1/2 or 3 hours.

Nobody who's really looked at the details will believe that a G4 PB will match a Pentium M for battery life....

My work computer is less then 1 yr old. When I'm using it on the road, it's for reading email or word processing. No real heavy usage while on batteries. At work, I've got about 6 different notebooks that I run software compatibly tests on. I work for IT and make sure that the new systems will work with our existing software. Using W2K or XP most of all the systems (ranging from 1.4GHz to 2GHz Pentium M) get NO WHERE NEAR 4hrs of battery life. That is running normal usage, not SETI@HOME or anything CPU intensive like that.

 

[fulmer]

A couple of YMMV comments....

Nobody who's really looked at the details will believe that a G4 PB will match a Pentium M for battery life....

I've run so many tests on so many different machines... There is no comparison when you add a second battery. That's not even an option on the Powerbooks! Our users complain about battery life also. It's not just my opinion.