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Tell me Why...

Clock speed is not a god measure of processor speed (rather like how horsepower is not the best measure of car speed, as you need to take weight and wind resistance into account). If you look at Centrino based laptops then they run in the same sort of clock speed ballpark, yet are as fast as laptops with 2-3Ghz PM processors. It's all about instructions per clock, which is tied into things like pipeline depth. Read some of the CPU articles on Ars Technica to learn more.
 
robbieduncan said:
Clock speed is not a god measure of processor speed (rather like how horsepower is not the best measure of car speed, as you need to take weight and wind resistance into account). If you look at Centrino based laptops then they run in the same sort of clock speed ballpark, yet are as fast as laptops with 2-3Ghz PM processors. It's all about instructions per clock, which is tied into things like pipeline depth. Read some of the CPU articles on Ars Technica to learn more.
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and the applications and the OS and the disks, the ram....
 
iSuck said:
Anyway guys, I looked at the prices for 12 inch ibooks in australia, startin from 1,324 dollars, reasonable....but then I looked closer and it said it only has 1.4 GHZ!!

Wot is up with that?!!?
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The G4 chip is not a P4 chip. The cycle speed is not 1 to 1 equivalent. It's more like multiply the G4 speed by 1.8 and you'll be "close" to the P4 speed. So the 1.4 GHz speed of the G4 is (kinda) equivalent to a 2.5GHz P4. But even that is misleading, because OSX is NOT Windows. They do things totally differently and each one has it's own strengths and weaknesses. You'll just have to take the word of a buncha Mac heads that a 1.4GHz G4 in a 12" laptop is pretty darned sweet. That's faster then a significant portion of the G4 Desktop machines out there.

All Macs come with OSX.
 
Ok...someone make this simple Cuz im really dumb..

1.3 on an Apple equals = WHAT ON A PC?
 
The other thing with the speed issue is that because Apple makes both the hardware and the OS, they are both fine-tuned for performance. Take my word for it, I'm running a 900 Mhz G4 iBook. It blazes. I run Unreal Tournament 2004 without any lag. Granted, I could run it at a higher resolution on a G5 PowerMac, but for my daily tasks and even stretching the processor a bit, this iBook is great. Why don't you go into a shop that sells Macs and try one out.. that's the best way, in my opinion.
 
iSuck said:
So yeah, are there any pc users out there who have recently changed to the mac format.
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I just switched to a 17 inch Powerbook 2-3 weeks ago and have not looked back since and I am, or used to be a very avid PC user. My PC is now being used by my parents, and I wish they had OS X on it, because it is soo much easier and more intuitive. Also its a lot stabler and also safer because of the lack of viruses for mac. As an alternative to kazaa lite try limewire.
As for photoshop, my high school had an educational version of Photoshop 7 which I can use. I will probably upgrade to CS when I get too College. Perhaps I can get it for free there too. I am getting Microsoft Office 2004 for free (well "free" - tuition is a crazy), so I havent bought it yet myself.

As for games, I don't miss playing counter strike nearly as much as I thought i would. I find that on the mac I have also been much more productive. Photoshop handles large files (300-400 mb) better on my PB than on my 2ghz P4 Dell with the same amount of RAM.

I have no regrets about switching.
 
Yeah, I am takin this into consideration and I am now pretty positive that a Mac is the way to go. Treehugger, what made you want to get a Mac?
 
plasticparadox said:
The other thing with the speed issue is that because Apple makes both the hardware and the OS, they are both fine-tuned for performance. Take my word for it, I'm running a 900 Mhz G4 iBook. It blazes. I run Unreal Tournament 2004 without any lag. Granted, I could run it at a higher resolution on a G5 PowerMac, but for my daily tasks and even stretching the processor a bit, this iBook is great. Why don't you go into a shop that sells Macs and try one out.. that's the best way, in my opinion.
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This 1.25 GHz G4 iMac I have seems fast and responsive to me. In terms of raw speed, it's not the fastest out there (my PC encodes iTunes songs 4 times as fast as my Mac on a good day), but it gets the job done. Also, it's been extremely stable. Ever since I got a PMU issue fixed after I bought the iMac, I've had 0 kernel panics and 2 mouse cursor freezes on the login screen (which required a hard restart to get the Mac into a usable state again, and only occurred after deleting preference files and attempting to log out and back in for the changes to take effect - in other words, don't worry about it). If I were you, I'd make sure you have at least as much memory in any Mac you buy as was in the last PC you used - and that should be no less than 256 MB.
 
What was the problem with word? My word is fine.

Yeah, I agree with lots of RAM. Mainly because OSX will tend to use the hdd instead of RAM when the RAM fills up. And since the standard laptop speed of hdd is 4200RPM that'll get hella slow. I always tell people to Max out their RAM. Whether through an Apple BTO or buying from Crucial, either way is fine. There has been less headaches since I switched to the Mac. I switched a little more than a year ago (March 03) and I'm a bit of a neat freak. I was at the point to where I'd reinstall Windows every weekend because I couldn't get rid of some programs through uninstalling. Mainly this was because in Windows programs preferences were stored in a registry and with every install you made the registry bigger. Therefore it takes longer to load. Mac preferences are stored in a folder as individual text files w/ the ext. .plist. And since not all of them load when I boot up, I feel a less of a need to remove them. Which is why, I believe, Windows slows down with regular use. Macs, I've found, do not get slower with use. I had to reinstall OSX recently (well, I didn't have to - turned out to be a problem with Apple's servers instead of a problem with Sherlock) and the new OSX installation wasn't any faster than my 6month old install of OSX.

The only big problems I've experienced with OSX is when left on for more than 20 days Finder gets odd, as key commands quit working it in. Though a log off and log in fixes it. Like I couldn't press Enter to rename a file and I couldn't tab on the dialog boxes when it asked me if I wanted to keep the old extension or use the new one.
 

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ChrisFromCanada said:
Are you talking about only G4's because by your logic you can now get a G5 that would be equal to a DUAL 4.5GHz Pentium system! :eek:
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As noted above (in a much earlier post), this applies only to G4s.

However, I would expect the application of mathmatical modifiers to the G5/P4 comparison to be even higher. Of course, at this point you are limited hugely by mitigating factors like RAM, video card type, 64b OS, etc.
 
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