Want the fastest Windows XP Core Duo notebook? Then buy a Mac. According to benchmarks carried out by website GearLog, Apple’s MacBook Pro running Windows XP is a better Adobe Photoshop rig than any other Core Duo laptop on the market. The site used a recently detailed technique that shoehorns the Microsoft operating system onto Intel-based Macs – a trick that last week won its formulators $13000 [EUR 10760] in prize money.
I would guess that one reason for this is higher quality hardware (the parts, not the laptop itself).
Does Apple make any of the actual parts for the laptop that would influence this? The processor, motherboard, memory and hard drive are all made by someone else, I presume?
Until the Intel switch, all Apple mobos were designed in-house (1976-2005).
As of now, Intel’s doing all the mobo mojo, and freed of the BIOS architecture they have a lot of room for improvement.
Try to say “mobo mojo” 3 times fast.
moh boh moh ioh moh boh moh ioh moh boh moh ioh. what?
Isn’t he the badguy on Powerpuff Girls?
I don’t think so… In fact, the G4 Powerbooks were assembled by prominent manufacturer, Asus; and most certainly, none of the parts within are all Apple’s doing. I would presume the same is true with the MacBooks. The most important hardware factor is obviously made by Intel.
Also worth noting that being faster at the Photoshop benchmark does not by itself equal a faster – especially considering the second-fastest Photoshop benchmark was a mere second behind the MacBook, whereas the Windows Media Encoding benchmarks place the Mac a good half-minute behind.
Of course, I would rather have all my benchmarks come from the same place, rather than comparing the benchmarks of one laptop from one site with the benchmarks of a bunch of different laptops from another site.
Asus assembled the PBs. Their contribution starts and ends there; Apple designed the boards, chose the circuitry and gave Asus the blueprints. I’ve seen Asus laptops and they don’t resemble Powerbooks under the hood.
The difference now is that Apple gave Intel the specs, the case blueprints and Intel essentially did the rest of the design process.
For all the other reasons for the switch, the repeated theme here is that Apple no longer has the mojo at building computers, and Motorola/IBM refused to partner enough to keep a competitive edge. Intel is piss-eager to show off what an x86 platform could be without legacy restrictions, and the results speak for themselves.
The irony here is that the MacBook Pros are only fractionally comparable to Dell laptops running patched versions of Tiger, but that they run Windows much faster than those same laptops.
Intel is piss-eager to show off what an x86 platform could be without legacy restrictions, and the results speak for themselves.
Translation – You didnt actually compare the results for yourself, and you have no idea if and what these legacy resrictions are (or if they even exist from the end users perspective).
Edited 2006-03-23 08:53
No detailed reviews have ever pointed to a case in which Apple has used any higher quality parts than the industry as a whole. Well, lets qualify that. If you think thicker aluminum cases are higher quality, that’s an exception. In fact, there is some evidence in some reviews, particularly in memory and hard drives, that the parts selection is at the lower end. There is plenty of evidence that case design is sometimes very poor, particularly in regard to cooling.
The reaction to this piece is a bit odd. Admittedly the article itself is not very transparent. But as Deviate_X has pointed out above, if you work through it all, you do not actually find that Apple is making the fastest Windows laptop.
So, you don’t need to look around to try to find any component choice or design reasons why it is faster. It isn’t.
I feel this as a slap in the face to Windows PC users…
Sorry guys, but you Windows people will just never win!!
{:o)
How?
Maybe you mean PC users?
I find these benchmarks claims surrounding apple products to be highly dubious “‘Fastest Windows XP Notebook'” for example.
… especially since the said laptop was actually slower on all the tests except one >->-> by 1 single second …
http://www.pcmag.com/image_popup/0,1871,s=1565&iid=127601,00.asp
Re: “I find these benchmarks claims surrounding apple products to be highly dubious”
I agree. This article is a waist of time to read. When benchmarking OSX, Windows and Linux on systems all hardware should be equal. Also the OS should run natively on the hardware, not emulated (ie: VMWare, Rosetta). What I noticed with the benchmarks is that even though the processors were identical for laptops #1 to #4 the graphics GPU were not. Only laptops #3 and #4 used NVIDIA Geforce Go 7800 GPU where as laptop #1 and #2 used ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 and X1600. I discounted laptops #5 and #6 used in the benchmark due to not only the GPU didn’t match but also the processors were not Intel Core Duo. Instead the final two laptops used Pentium M processors which even the Pentium M were not identical to each other.
A suggestion for OSNews staff is to review articles submitted by either the author or third party prior to posting or linking it on OSNews. A job normally handled by the Editor.
Edited 2006-03-23 00:42
so… when compairing notebooks to each other, tehy should be the exact same notebook?
“What I noticed with the benchmarks is that even though the processors were identical for laptops #1 to #4 the graphics GPU were not. Only laptops #3 and #4 used NVIDIA Geforce Go 7800 GPU where as laptop #1 and #2 used ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 and X1600.”
The MacBook Pro has an ATI X1600, BUT NO ACCELERATED DRIVERS yet -only a generic VGA-like driver- so I doubt there is any advantage in that.
all the laptops tested had 2GHz Core Duo CPUs … So did the Acer, which came in a nose of beating the 2.16GHz MacBook Pro.
All the other laptops tested beat the MBP at the windows media encode test. The MBP beat them all in the photoshop test it’s true, though it only beat the Acer by 1 second. That despite the fact the Acer, like all the other laptops tested, was using a slower CPU than the MBP.
As more core duo laptops roll out using the newer CPU, that result likely won’t last. That’s not to say those were bad results, it just they’re not quite as hot with some context.
The motherboard on the Mac with intel chips are designed by Apple, Intel is involved in it too of course but thats not the same design that you will find on other motherboards in other laptops. Just look at the motherboard on the macbook pro, it seems very different and particularly very snall compared to usual motherboard found on pc.
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/85.1.15.html
Also i believe that Apple is able to make a thin lapop as they do with mac book pro because they design themself their motherboards that has to fit with the aggressive design of their computers.
What I dont get is that Photoshop is running fast in the benches…and that results in the fastest running XP notebook is a Macbook? Or does it mean that the dual core processors from Intel are the shizz and they are very well performing! So I could potentially get a dual core Dell, Acer, Lenovo etc etc and get the same performance…right?
Right, if the other parts are of the same quality as in the Mac. RAM, bus speeds, and possibly HDD and GFX card being most important factors in this case.