First off, my complements on an excellent post. Second, I am one of those people who, not necessarily wanting to move to WinTel, is feeling somewhat pressured to by the reality of Apple's hardware offerings. I NEED a portable. I also NEED to run image analysis and editing apps. I sometimes churn through monster stacks of images with a Java app. called ImageJ, which looks virtually identical on the Mac and the PC. Heck, for that, I could run Linux on a PC laptop, I don't even need Windows (I would probably opt for that, actually). Anyway, the fact of the matter is, for that kind of work, PM-equipped laptops are opertating, today, at roughly double the speed of very comparably-priced Apple laptops. I know this because I have seen it with my own eyes. I have processed the same stack of images using ImageJ 1.31 on a 1.25GHz G4 15" Al Powerbook (Price $2300/Combo drive) with a gig of RAM, and a 1.4GHz IBM Thinkpad T41 (Price $1900/CDRW/DVD-ROM)...fairly comparable computers interms EXCEPT the processor. The difference spoke for itself. That extra 175MHz in speed on the PM translates, in my hands, to over double the speed of the G4 Powerbook...roughly two minutes and ten seconds for the G4 to process the stack vs. about one 50 seconds for the PM. Talk about megahertz myth. The G4 has 512k L2 cache, and runs off a 167MHz bus. The PM has a 1 meg L2 cache, and runs off a 400MHz bus. The effect these differences have speak for themselves. After borrowing to computers to run this very real-world benchmark, I spent a bood portion of the afternoon feeling depressed. I love my Mac Portable. It's built like a truck, is SO damn easy to use, I love the interface, I can't say enough nice, warm, fuzzy things about it.
But sometimes warm fuzzies don't cut it. I need to get work done. Work that can really chew through serious hardware resources. I've seen it with my own eyes: The Thinkpad is the practical champ, hands down. For things I NEED to do, at my job, it mops the floor with the G4. The extra boost to 1.5 GHz isn't going to close the gap all that much. So why bother?And when I compare the Thinkpad with my own Ti667, well...I don't even want to talk about that, the disparity is so horrific.
So, I'm rapidly approaching the point where watching the spinning beachball is eating up significant chunks of my time on the Ti667. If I wasn't such a Mac whore I would have ditched the thing last year. I don't even need Apple to beat WinTel. I'd be happy with near-parity. I'd just like to see that stack transform and spit out data on my Mac Laptop the way it did on my colleagues Stinkpad. When will that happen? If "never" is the answer, I can't stay on the Mac, no matter how much I love it. It's simply not a viable portable option. I'm stretching my patience to the limit just waiting until x-mas on the probably vain hope that there are radically new portable chip offerings in the works. If there are not, my hand is pretty much forced.
