Bench-Marketing

I watched Steve Jobs introduce Apple's new products at MacWorld Expo this morning. He showed a scripted test in Photoshop running side-by-side on a 500mhz G4 and a 1ghz PC, then again on a dual-CPU G4 and the same PC. While I rarely trust any company's single benchmark to rate their product, this one especially perturbed me. How much and what types of RAM did the machines have? What speed hard drives? Why didn't Apple also include a dual-CPU PC in their benchmarks? Jobs basically compared dual-CPU Macs to single CPU PC's and declared that Macs were the fastest, while never once mentioning that dual-CPU PC's are fairly commonplace.

I then realized that the real reason that Apple is now offering the dual-CPU Macs is because Motorola can't get the clock speed of the G4's to surpass 500mhz in any quantity yet. It's been almost a year since Apple introduced the G4 PowerMacs, and we haven't seen a speed-bump yet. I can't even buy PC's with the same speed Pentium III CPU's that I bought at this time last year!

Maybe Apple should port Mac OS X to the x86 platform, I'd buy a copy...