New Apple Computer Released Today

[Lawrence of Arabia]

And I prefer my Dell laptop over Apple.

You know that Dell has moved its customer service department to India. I hope you enjoy talking to people who can hardly speak english.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

I'm pretty sure that from what he wrote, it's an IBM Thinkpad, LoA .

Which series?

[Imran Siddiqui]

You know that Dell has moved its customer service department to India. I hope you enjoy talking to people who can hardly speak english.

I don't mind. I can understand the accent perfectly... and most people don't have an accent (such as the lady I spoke to when I called to cancel AOL).

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Asher

Please -- the only stuff you believe is the crap from Apple.

You look at the official SPEC benchmarks, the IBM benchmarks, the NASA benchmarks -- the G5 is slower than the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP, not to mention the Athlon 64 and Pentium 5.

:what Lawrence said:

Just shows you have no credibility on this issue. Enjoy your cheap, slow computer.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I always hear from the Macheads that Mac processors are faster, but I never see any proof from unbiased sources. Asher posts all these charts and stuff from places like NASA and stuff all the time.

So until I see proof, I'll go with what Asher has posted.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
Which laptop do you have Asher? Sony Viao?

IBM ThinkPad T40

A far better laptop in every department than the old and new PowerBooks, and it's been out since March 2003...

Smaller, lighter, faster, more feature-rich, far better warranty protection, way more durable.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
I always hear from the Macheads that Mac processors are faster, but I never see any proof from unbiased sources. Asher posts all these charts and stuff from places like NASA and stuff all the time.

So until I see proof, I'll go with what Asher has posted.

You always hear from the Macheads? I said that the high end Pentium is faster than the G4. That is generally acknowleged, but then again Apple is phasing out the G4 in its pro computers.

I don't think Apple disputes that Intel is faster for that particular operation; they leave out others at which the G5 is superior as LOA pointed out.

SPEC tests in general are rigged and aren't as much use as real life application performance. That was basically the upshot of the furore surrounding the G5 benchmarks a couple of months back.

Anyway, when your computer can do this give me a call.

[Agathon]

BTW the picture doesn't really do justice to the fact that each of those smaller windows is a miniature version of a full size window that gently reduced to what you see here so that you could see all open windows. I wish I had an mpeg of it, it is really impressive: although this is clearly an overkill situation.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Asher

Smaller, lighter, faster, more feature-rich, far better warranty protection, way more durable.

But it runs a ****ty, user unfriendly, ugly-looking, crash happy, OS that you have to patch two or three times a day.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
I'm only asking because I'm interested in what sort of monitor you have. If its a tiny 10 incher or a larger 15 inch. If it has internal DVD and CD player and DVD and CD burner. If it has FireWire 800 or FireWire 400. If it has bluetooth. If its got a backlit keyboard, 80 GB of harddrive, 512 RAM which can be expanded to 2 GBs, all of it internal.

It's "only" a 14.1" display, but it's 1400x1050, which is a far higher resolution than the PowerBooks support.

It has an internal DVD/CD-RW combo (no DVD-R, but that's easily fixed if I ever want to by replacing my UltraBay Slim port). The UltraBay Slim port is 9.5mm tall, the smallest in the industry.

No FireWire 800 or 400, because those are totally useless in the PC world. USB 2.0 instead.

The design for the backlight on the PowerBooks is stupid from a functionality standpoint. It's a total battery killer, it looks like crap after a month or so of use because of all of the hair/dust/etc that accumulates between the keys. My Laptop has something called the "ThinkLight" which is a miniature light attached to the top of the screen which illuminates the keyboard in low-light situations. A far more elegant, and functional, solution that is far easier on your batteries. Although it doesn't have the "wow that's nifty" (initial) effect of the PowerBook's, admittedly.

And it's got 768MB DDR RAM right now, expandable to 2GB. But it's also 2 CAS (how many cycles it takes to access the columns in the RAM), rather than the 3 CAS crap they put in PowerBooks or 2.5 in the PowerMacs.

It's also got 1MB of L2 cache, way faster CPU, way longer battery life, more upgradability (can you simply swap an internal mini-PCI card to upgrade your internal wireless card at any time?), diversity antennas, made out of titanium instead of aluminum, smaller, lighter, shock-absorbed harddrive, etc.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Agathon
But it runs a ****ty, user unfriendly, ugly-looking, crash happy, OS that you have to patch two or three times a day.

I think the idiocy of this comment speaks not only for your judgement with computers and operating systems, but for the computers and operating systems you promote.

Congratulations of reaching the level of a 6 year old boy arguing over which Power Ranger is better.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
Which means its possible that the G5 is faster then what they found.

It means it's faster than the G4, which isn't a surprise whatsoever. Pentium IIIs were faster than the G4 in most cases.

This test tested scalar floating point comparisons

Which is a PLUS for the G5 -- the G5's strongpoint is floating point. Even in Apple's own tests they published, the P4 is faster in integer operations.

and does not test vector floating point.

It doesn't test vector floating point because the G5's vector floating point allows only 32-bit numbers, which are not of high enough precision for these types of operations.

That's why SSE2 is better than AltiVec, it can do 32-bit OR 64-bit floats in SIMD instead of just 32-bit like the G4/G5.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Asher

It's "only" a 14.1" display, but it's 1400x1050, which is a far higher resolution than the PowerBooks support.

It has an internal DVD/CD-RW combo (no DVD-R, but that's easily fixed if I ever want to by replacing my UltraBay Slim port). The UltraBay Slim port is 9.5mm tall, the smallest in the industry.

No FireWire 800 or 400, because those are totally useless in the PC world. USB 2.0 instead.

The design for the backlight on the PowerBooks is stupid from a functionality standpoint. It's a total battery killer, it looks like crap after a month or so of use because of all of the hair/dust/etc that accumulates between the keys. My Laptop has something called the "ThinkLight" which is a miniature light attached to the top of the screen which illuminates the keyboard in low-light situations. A far more elegant, and functional, solution that is far easier on your batteries. Although it doesn't have the "wow that's nifty" (initial) effect of the PowerBook's, admittedly.

And it's got 768MB DDR RAM right now, expandable to 2GB. But it's also 2 CAS (how many cycles it takes to access the columns in the RAM), rather than the 3 CAS crap they put in PowerBooks or 2.5 in the PowerMacs.

It's also got 1MB of L2 cache, way faster CPU, way longer battery life, more upgradability (can you simply swap an internal mini-PCI card to upgrade your internal wireless card at any time?), diversity antennas, made out of titanium instead of aluminum, smaller, lighter, shock-absorbed harddrive, etc.

But it runs a ****ty, user unfriendly, ugly-looking, crash happy, OS that you have to patch two or three times a day.

Nuff said.

[Asher]

That is so sad of you in so many ways, Agathon.

I take that as an obvious victory for myself, you've not only retreated to idiotic rhetoric, you've done it twice in a row and started with the "LOL" smilies.

[Asher]

How many hours of real-world battery life do the new PowerBooks get? That's my #1 concern, and the 7 hours real-world the T40 gets per battery was what sold me.