David's World

January 18, 2006

Apple Maniacs drool over new iMac computers - why?

Computer freaks these days go nuts over the upcoming Apple hardware. For the first time, Apple is using an Intel chip, which mainly allows them to provide better performance in their laptops.

People post videos of an old next to a new Mac booting, and they time all sorts of crazy procedures with the new machines.
I read a few performance analyses (for instance, MacBook Pro vs. G4 1.67 PB) and I can't help but wonder whether we all live on the same planet. Seriously: how often do I encode music with iTunes or a video with Quicktime? Do I run 10 Photoshop filters on my RAW camera data all day? Do I use my £1500 Powerbook to play whatever frame-rate-demanding ego shooter?

To those millions of prime time TV news reporters out there: read those analyses. To you porn artists, go drool over a machine that encodes pink colors faster than ever. To those game fanatics, go buy a big Windows machine now! Freaks of the world, go and brag about your new machine that starts up in 35, not 40 seconds.

What I'd like to see is a machine that starts applications without delay, be it The Gimp or Safari. Something that renders web sites immediately. A box that doesn't make me wait when I use Spotlight searching for an e-mail among my 60.000 e-mails of the last years.

So what really counts to me is real-life performance. I rarely see that published, and honestly, I don't have exactly high hopes for a dual-core machine to be much faster here. Maybe the faster bus will help. Let's see...