STATIC DISCLAIMER: All the stuff in here is purely my opinions, and they tend to change depending on what mood I'm in. If you're going to get bitter if I say something about you that you don't like, then maybe don't read. I avoid using names as much as possible, and would request that people who know me do the same in their comments. Basically, I often vent my frustrations on here, so if you happen to be someone who frustrates me, expect to read a description of someone very much like you in here!

Friday, August 26, 2005

Apple are funny

I was surfing Apple's website to have a look at whether they have Macs with Intel processors in them yet, and I stumbled accross this page. On this page, it compared a Mac with a Dell PC for graphic performance, and they used Halo as a benchmark. Here's the graph of the results:


I mean, wow, look at that. A comparable system with a G5 processor is faster. That is, if it's comparable. Here's a quote from the fine, greyed out print under this image.
The iMac systems used 128 MB ATI Radeon 9600 graphics processors. The Dell Dimension 4700c used a 64 MB ATI Radeon X300 SE graphics processor.

So the Dell system had a lower-model graphics card with half the RAM. Now there's a fair comparison. I haven't even investigated the speed of the Dell processor (I'm not going to bother), but it would seem to me that seeing as how you can put any graphics card into a Mac or PC now, it would have been a much fairer test to set both machines up with the same quantity of RAM, same graphics processor and same graphics memory. But are we interested in fair comparisons? Obviously not.

This isn't so much a Mac-hack as just a general advertising/corperate garbage hack. I just wish people would be honest, you know? Sell the thing on it's selling points. Don't mention it's shortfallings - that's fine. But just don't pretend it's something it's not.
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1 comment:

Monkeytree said...

Yep, it's called marketing - read as "how can I twist this to make it sound as good as possible". It's the problem of comparing apples to oranges, and they've sorta painted the orange red and put a stalk in the top, to extend the metaphor way too far. I'd like to see a price comparison between the two sets of hardware though. As usual, this kind of evaluation is all about the tradeoffs involved and it really comes down to whether the system is fit for the intended purpose, rather than whether its blue bar is 57% longer!*

(*actual blue bar length may not match diagram)

Tuesday, August 30, 2005 3:29:00 pm

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