In his new book “Illustrator CS for Dummies,” Ted Alspach, Adobe’s Group Product Manager for Illustration Products, advises new computer buyers to get a PC: “As of 2003, Windows systems have taken a decisive lead over Macs when it comes to performance. The difference is most apparent with graphics applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator, but you”ll notice it with other applications as well. If you?’re thinking of purchasing a new system, and speed and responsiveness is important (or at least more important than the feel of the OS, I suggest getting a zippy PC over a (comparably) sluggish Mac“. This is not the first time Adobe (Apple’s #1 third party software house) pushes its customers towards the PC. The previous time it ended with Apple’s PR firing back at Adobe through the media.
Adobe: Use PCs instead of Macs, Round II
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I wonder if he were anyone else, would his comments be considered trolling?
they claim that the G5 is the fastest, most powerful pc on earth.
in fact, the Athlon64 enjoys that title, as well as fastest x86 chip.
Adobe corroborates that pcs are faster than G5.
Apple has been dishonest about its claims
Well this is absolutely true. For the same money you’re going to pay for a well equiped G4/5 you can get a PC that is nearly twice as fast in graphics/video processing (and in other operations as well) than a Mac… Just the shiny case and the Aqua interface don’t justify the price for me.
Windows XP pro running on a quality system (think DELL for instance) built by somebody that knows what they’re doing barely ever crashes. I am still to see a blue screen or a fatal crash caused by the OS (not some crappy application) in the past 7-8 months.
Well, then, prove it…
Okay, twice as fast? Benchmarks to prove that? PCs faster, maybe, twice as fast? I doubt it.
Besides, if you think Dell makes quality PCs, you haven’t been around them long enough. I can’t tell you how many Dell Laptops I’ve had to replace mice, cdroms, floppies, etc. (withing the three year warranty). IBMs hold up a lot better, in my experience.
apple is dishonest about G5 speed claims
Well, their benchmarks certainly were dishonest. They ran SPEC CPU2000 on their competator’s systems for them, rather than going with the posted numbers, and compiled it with gcc, which crippled the performance. There are apologists who will make up claims that gcc is used for “scientific computing” which is who Apple allegedly was targeting the benchmarks at (although this is highly dubious). However, as I do work in scientific computing (mesoscale atmospheric modelling, to be precise, just check the domain of my address) I assure you, on our clusters we use Intel’s icc and ifc, not gcc.
In fact, the Athlon64 enjoys that title, as well as fastest x86 chip.
Clock for clock, the G5 currently performs about as well as an Opteron when running G4-optimized code on the G5 and IA32 code on the Opteron. The difference is that IBM will soon release a final version of their XL C compiler for OS X, at which point applications can be compiled in a truly G5 optimized manner. The full potential of the processor cannot be realized, however, until Apple defines a 64-bit ABI for OS X.
On the AMD64 side, there is no highly optimized compiler waiting to be used. Unlike the POWER architecture, which IBM has had over a decade to fine-tune their compiler for, AMD64 is a relatively new ISA, and compiler availablity is scant at best. It will be at least a half decade before AMD64 processors can begin to be used to their fullest potential.
As for the Athlon 64 being the fastest x86 chip, have any benchmark numbers to back that up? Unless I’m mistaken, the 3.2GHz P4 holds that title.
Just to point out, those statements would have been written BEFORE the G5 came out, and therefore, make the statement old. When you compared the latest PC offerings with the G4, and pre-G5 stuff, the PC statement could possible hold water.
However, I am not a Mac user, nor am I a hardware expert. I merely wanted to point out that timing of the written comments to the G5 release. There, hopefully I covered myself.
I was just giving an example w/ Dell (the PC I’m typing from right now is Dell). I know they are nowhere near the best brand out there but they are pretty reliable.
And, yes, I was exagerating a little bit (I tought it was obvious) but it is a fact that PCs are mutch faster than Mac (for the same price) in most tasks.
I think Adobe is just pissed at Apple for years of G3 and G4 crap. Adobe used to favor Macs over PCs, and I’m sure they took some flak for their preferred platform being slower than the competition.
The G5 is Apple’s first decent CPU in many years. The G3 has hampered by crappy FPU performance, and the G4 was held back by a dated memory bus that kept AltiVec from showing its stuff. Independent benchmarks (*never* trust benchmarks from the company that makes the machine!) show the G5 to be a decent bit faster clock-for-clock than a comparable Athlon64 machine. What IBM needs to do is keep the clock-speed ramping up in line with x86 processors, and what Apple needs to do is find a way to sell them cheaply. Apple’s got a little bit of breathing room right now on the price front — Athlon 64’s don’t come cheap. But that won’t last long, and eventually they’ll become commodity, and you’ll find them in $1500 Dells. If Apple can’t keep pace with the price reductions, we’ll be back in G3/G4-era again — too much cash from not enough performance.
try these reviews
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112603,00.asp
http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=6714
“PC Gaming / Athlon FX trounces fastest P4 in Gaming!”
AnandTech: Athlon 64 vs. Apple G5 Systems: Not Even Close
http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.html?i=20685
CNN.com – Tests of AMD’s 64-bit PCs: Fastest yet – Sep. 24, 2003 “These systems produced some of the fastest test results we’ve …
cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ ptech/09/24/amd.athlon.ap
Anonymous (IP: 165.134.115.—)
Adobe corroborates that pcs are faster than G5.
The last page they posted on PCs being faster was taken down soon thereafter, amid community response about Premiere’s severe inferiority when compared with packages like Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Avid’s Xpress DV.
There is no market for Premiere on Mac, so obviously Adobe had a vested interest in touting the PC platform over Macs… it was the only way they could compete with Final Cut Pro, on uneven turf.
As for this latest incident, it wasn’t like this was an Adobe press release, it’s simply the personal opinion of an Adobe employee as mentioned in his book. The performance gap between PCs and Macs has closed dramatically in 2003, yet he seems to make it out as if this year the opposite has happened, and PCs have made massive strides against the Mac platform. This comment would’ve been much more poingant before the release of the G5.
Obry (IP: —.dsl.mindspring.com)
Well this is absolutely true. For the same money you’re going to pay for a well equiped G4/5 you can get a PC that is nearly twice as fast in graphics/video processing (and in other operations as well) than a Mac… Just the shiny case and the Aqua interface don’t justify the price for me.
Wrong in regards to video editing. Please see this table:
http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/2/0,3363,sz=1&i=…
from this PC Magazine article:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1274138,00.asp
As you can see, the G5 thoroughly CREAMED the dual 3.06GHz Xeon in Avid performance, 620 seconds to 813. Avid Xpress DV is the definitive professional video editing tool, and one of the few currently available for both Windows and MacOS X. Would you consider PC Magazine to be a “Mac biased” source?
Your comment about the compilers is *way* off base. First, IBM has not had 10 years to optimize for the PPC970 architecture. The PPC970 (and the POWER4) is very different from the POWER CPUs that came before it. They’re a lot like modern x86 chips — PowerPC on the outside, very different core architecture on the inside.
Anyway, the AMD64 ISA is hardly a new architecture. Its good old x86 with 64-bit extensions. AMD is not in a position to drive compiler writers — their CPUs have to perform well with regular x86 code. As a result, the excellent compilers available for x86 today (gcc, Intel C++) will generate excellent Athlon64 code with a bit of tweeking. In any case, its not all that much work to optimize a compiler for processors like the G5 and the Athlon64. The processor does a lot of the work for you, so once you have the high-level optimization infrastructure in place (*that* takes years) the CPU-specific stuff is comparatively easy. Now, architectures like IA64 are a whole different bag of cats — they do no internal optimization, so the compiler is extremely complex and CPU-specific.
Anonymous (IP: 165.134.115.—)
try these reviews
Oh please, not the Word, Quake III, and Premiere benchmark. Look at the benchmark I posted for Avid Xpress performance. No one in their right mind would purchase a G5 for use with Premiere.
Also note the only x86 system that was able to beat the G5 on Photoshop performance was the dual 2GHz Opteron, in which case the differences were certainly negligable compared to the enormous gap in Avid Xpress performance between the G5 and a dual 3.06GHz Xeon.
Find some numbers for the Athlon 64 for some more professional apps. In light of this article, Illustrator performance would be interesting. I’d also like to see the performance of things like Painter, QuarkXPress, and ProTools compared.
why is adobe taking any position on this at all. it is really not their place to do so.
they could be pissed off at apple. apple is competing with them.
could be they want to get rid of apple to support linux.
Could be they just want to be honest and helpful though corporations rarely do things for this reason alone.
While Apple’s number one third party software vendor continues to promote the PC platform over the Mac, only a long term negative effect can prevail over other Mac software vendors and Mac sales in general.
In reality though, Adobe must be seeing no longterm future in th Mac platform.
an adobe product manager said this in his book. ah so what. if it came from an official company line its a big deal but this…so what? everyone has an opinion.
Your comment about the compilers is *way* off base. First, IBM has not had 10 years to optimize for the PPC970 architecture.
I didn’t say they did. The compiler has evolved with the architecture, as the two are made by the same vendor, and has been incrementally optimized by IBM to accomidate changes in the processor design.
Can you point to anything similar on the AMD64 side? x86 compilers are optimized to work with a dearth of registers available on the x86 ISA. Do you believe there are any compilers that are fully utilizing the advantages of the AMD64 ISA?
And regardless, in the realm of scientific computing the scene is drastically different. The only Fortran 90 compiler I’m aware of for Linux/AMD64 is the Portland Group one, and its IA32 counterpart is rather pathetic compared to the Intel Fortran compiler. Meanwhile, on the OS X side IBM is working on a port of their excellent XL Fortran compiler:
http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/preconfig.jsp?id=2003…
but he IS a project manager. whether or not this is Adobe’s opinion, it certainly is leading….
There are huge threads on Ars Technica’s battlefront discussing the performance of various applications under various setups. This is the closest we have to peer-reviewed scores of standard action suites; not Apple’s claims or some magazine’s testing using unknown and often very bad practices (like using total time of a set of filters instead of a normalized score).
At this time, there are no “real” known scores for Opteron systems under Photoshop, because not enough users have them. The G5 is currently Photoshop king. One Ars Technica member gathers and tracks system scores (and if you review this guy’s posting history, he is by no means a Mac lover):
http://www.geocities.com/sw_perf/PSBench.html
i’ll be the first to tell someone that yea “macs are slower then pcs”
but as soon as you open your trap and start proclaiming that PCs are twice ast fast as Macs …your just a big fat liar.
I dont care which one is faster my question is which one do I use to get my work done more and it has always been a PC, never a Mac. I like the Mac and I have a couple of Macs but I enjoy PC’s more and the Mac just doesnt hold any special place in my heart. In this case I too have found the PC to perform much better than the Mac in alot of Applications, not to mention the PC has more apps available for it, Im not a photoshop GURU so i cant give specific benchmarks but I just like the look and feel of Windows and Windows applications more than the Mac, now before I have Mac users saying ” Windows gets in your way while you work ” I dont have that problem and i find Windows to be just as user friendly as the Mac.
top of the line opteron is faster then top of the line g5. period.
“Independent benchmarks show the G5 to be a decent bit faster clock-for-clock than a comparable Athlon64 machine”
stop with the Athlon64 bit. We’re talking the fastest chips from Apple(IBM), AMD and Intel that are obtainable TODAY.
so put down the crack pipe…Apple has a fast and good machine, yes. but it does not even come close to being “a decent bit faster” then top of the line opteron.
I have just got a new G5 after selling my G4 733 and using my Girlfriend’s pc for a few months which is an Althon XP2000+. I have to say that i’m amazed about the performance of the dual G5!! My god its fast and thats even on 10.2.8… i cant wait to see what its like on 10.3. I get annoyed at people who say they are slow because i just havent seen that yet, even my G4 733 was perfectly fine for eveyday use, and i didnt find it slow compared to the XP 2000+ at all.
http://www.geocities.com/sw_perf/PSBench.html
I dont know him and I dont know his qualifications by which to issue any kind of benchmark. No offense to the webmaster or to anyone but I consider that page to be an opinion of a end-user, not an authority and not a reliable source.
Okay… we should try a real world benchmark ourselves…
not with individual tasks, but in a quantitive way. How much real work can we do in, let’s say a week? a month? You know… how do our systems perform in day to day REAL world tasks… You know, when the deadline for that spot is due by 9:00 am and we have to stay up all night…
It’s funny, at the recent Apple tour in which Adobe participated in a big way they announced that product activation was ONLY going to be on the PC side NOT the MAC side… why, I don’t know… Macromedia is doing it… I guess it’s because Quark does it and they need to gain market share in the HIGH END printing market (where Macs are predominant).
I haven’t did a hard study myself in this (I use both Mac and PC). All I can say is I usually find myself working on the Mac and ignoring the PC…
Jb
uh no.
don’t bring it up. it’s stupid.
when we have AVIDEXPRESSnews.com and we’re all talking about the fastest Avid Express machine, because we’re all making a living using AE….THEN it might be relevant.
which is never.
show me some other benchmarks please. (yes i do agree the word, premiere, quake benchmarks were horrible too….i just wanted to comment that Avid is not a substitute …and is equally horrible)
Hmmmm… let’s see. Adobe picks up a Microsoft-like activation scheme, MS drops plans to create a PDF-like format. MS just announced development of a product to be a Macromedia Flash killer, Macromedia being one of Adobe’s biggest competitors in graphics/web/vector apps. Adobe bad-mouths Macintoshes, while Apple is a big competitor to MS in the OS market and a big competitor to Adobe in video editing.
The thing I find funny is that Apple has the Lion’s share of the creative market. I am not talking Animation or web but Design and now video production. I don’t really have any numbers to back up my claim but having been in the Graphics field professionally for almost ten years, Macs still dominate in almost every major design firm I know of as well they should IMHO. Seems weird that Adobe would want to piss off a huge part of their revenue. Not like us Mac users could do anyhting about it anyway since Adobe products are the standard. I would be careful if I were Adobe because I could definately see Apple making their own graphics suite which like almost all of their previous Pro apps would give the competition a run for their money.
“The G5 is Apple’s first decent CPU in many years.”
I agree. My G3 iBook is pitifully slow with 10.3. It’s like using a 486. G5 is fast but way outside my budget. (And 10.3 has locked up 3 times on me now. 10.2.8 was rock solid).
uh no.
don’t bring it up. it’s stupid.
I didn’t bring it up, Obry did by saying this:
For the same money you’re going to pay for a well equiped G4/5 you can get a PC that is nearly twice as fast in graphics/video processing (and in other operations as well) than a Mac…
Which clearly isn’t true… it’s highly doubtful a dual 3.2GHz Xeon would be enough to surpass the G5 in Avid performance, considering the G5 currently commands a 25% performance lead over the dual 3.06GHz Xeon according to those benchmarks.
Please keep the scope of the G5 in mind. The dual G5 is a high end workstation for the professional market. These people are going to be using tools like: Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, InDesign, Avid Xpress DV, AfterEffects, ProTools, Cubase, all of which are available on both Windows and MacOS X. Why not benchmark these tools to show which platform truly provides the best performance for professional use?
when we have AVIDEXPRESSnews.com and we’re all talking about the fastest Avid Express machine, because we’re all making a living using AE….THEN it might be relevant.
which is never.
Well, what other way is there to go as far as benchmarking the Mac? G5s will be used primarily as an applications platform for these applications, so aren’t these the most pertainent?
The only other type of benchmark that might be worth considering is our model. I am currently working on compiling and benchmarking our atmospheric modelling program (http://atmet.com) on a G5, and one of the other research groups here has recently purchased an Opteron. It will be interesting to see the differences in model performance between the Opteron with the AMD64 Portland Group compiler and the G5 with the IBM XL Fortran compiler.
I didn’t say they did. The compiler has evolved with the architecture, as the two are made by the same vendor, and has been incrementally optimized by IBM to accomidate changes in the processor design.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
You said it in a way that implied that IBM had a 10-year head start in compilers for the G5. In truth, the x86-based compilers have been incrementally improved as well.
Can you point to anything similar on the AMD64 side? x86 compilers are optimized to work with a dearth of registers available on the x86 ISA. Do you believe there are any compilers that are fully utilizing the advantages of the AMD64 ISA?
>>>>>>>>>
The AMD64 is designed to get excellent performance out of existing x86 code. That means that current x86 compilers are already well-tuned for the AMD64. The ISA isn’t different enough to negate all the work that has gone into tuning for older x86 CPUs. The largest difference is the number of available registers, and adapting to that is not a big deal. GCC (and presumably other compilers) uses a generic register allocator. That means that the number of registers (and their constraints) are just parameters to a very general register allocation algorithm. Between that and tweeks to the DFA description to adjust for differences in the pipeline, my guess would be that you’ll have compilers getting more or less optimal performance out of the AMD64 as soon as the platform becomes a little more mature. Its more like 5 months, not 5 years.
And regardless, in the realm of scientific computing the scene is drastically different. The only Fortran 90 compiler I’m aware of for Linux/AMD64 is the Portland Group one, and its IA32 counterpart is rather pathetic compared to the Intel Fortran compiler. Meanwhile, on the OS X side IBM is working on a port of their excellent XL Fortran compiler:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
There are at least 3 Fortran 95 compilers for AMD64: the NAGWare, AbSoft, and PGI compilers. The AbSoft There are probably more — I don’t know a whole lot about FORTRAN.
Hello,
Everyone knows that Microsoft is developing for MAC. But is it possible that some MAC G5 are used to develop software for the Xbox 2 (based on a PowerPC processor) ? Virtual PC might be use to emulated the Xbox1 CPU fro backward compatibility.
Am I that wrong ?
Regards
Kamelito
The thing I find funny is that Apple has the Lion’s share of the creative market. I am not talking Animation or web but Design and now video production. I don’t really have any numbers to back up my claim but having been in the Graphics field professionally for almost ten years, Macs still dominate in almost every major design firm I know of as well they should IMHO.
The PC zealots here seem unwilling to acknowledge this. Audio/video production and publications/preprint are done almost exclusively on Macs, and given the performance figures of the G5 this is unlikely to change, as there is currently no compelling reason to change. A dual 2GHz Opteron may be able to edge out the G5 in Photoshop performance, but for the most part the G5 is on par with the PC offerings. Suddenly issues of interoperability and interface come into play. On the newspaper I used to work at the photographers and editors absolutlely *hated* the Windows MDI implementation for one simple reason: the gray background obscured the desktop icons, while the shared menu interface on a Mac doesn’t.
Seems weird that Adobe would want to piss off a huge part of their revenue.
Except this isn’t Adobe, it’s the opinion of a single individual who also happens to be an Adobe employee. It made much more sense when Adobe was trying to move their fringe market of Mac Premiere users to PC, afraid they would lose them to Final Cut Pro (and most likely, they did)
Hmmmm… let’s see. Adobe picks up a Microsoft-like activation scheme, MS drops plans to create a PDF-like format.
Sometimes you don’t have the choice to lick some butts if you don’t want to be annihilated. IMO, MS has the power to wipe PDF.
MS just announced development of a product to be a Macromedia Flash killer, Macromedia being one of Adobe’s biggest competitors in graphics/web/vector apps.
Sadly, that’s what happens to any good idea brought by a 3rd-party to Windows. Browsers, office suites, instant messenging…
Does anyone else suspect that Adobe might have yet another reason for the shift away from Apple? To me at least, it seems fairly obvious that Adobe wants its users to stay on a platform that will keep them as Adobe only users for years to come.
I am sure that no one at Adobe trusts Jobs not to buy or build a Photoshop/Illustrator competitor, thus forcing Adobe out of its niche Apple market the same way it happened with Premiere and to a larger extent Acrobat. (yet another example is MS and its less that enthusiastic commitment to Office and IE on the MacOS).
If Apple continues down this one-stop-shopping model, vendors will continue to bail on Apple.
In the long run, that may mean more profits for Apple, but more than likely at the cost of higher costs for their users.
Well I just switched from an Athlon XP 1700 system with 768mb ram and 200gigs of HD space running WinXP and Mandrake 9.1 to an ibook with an 800mhz G3, 640mb ram, and it feels just as fast as my WinXP did. Photoshop runs great in it as does Flash and all the other programs I needed.
Sure it costs a little more but it has been worth it for me. WinXP was having problems all the time and I was sick and tired of fixing it and replacing drivers and wasting my time!
🙂 hehe what would be the next assignement? First it was, Linux on the XBOX, next, getting MacOS X run on XBOX?
I agree. Use the platform that works best for you. For me its been Windows XP for gaming and some apps. Linux and MacoSX on the server and MacOSX as a daily desktop.
I happen to be more productive on a Mac than on Linux or Windows. Thats what works for me.
This guy is not Adobe. But given his position his opinion have some weight. But a book, even for dummies, is not writen and made in one day. Eventually, at the moment he wrote that, there was no G5 in sight yet?
This comment has been posted word for word over and over and over… Damn! Get some new material!
But a book, even for dummies, is not writen and made in one day. Eventually, at the moment he wrote that, there was no G5 in sight yet?
This is probably the best post made on this entire thread. It’s entirely possible that this book was written prior to the release of the G5, as Apple kept it secret as long as possible despite widely circulated rumours. It could simply be at the time the book was written the G4 PowerMacs were the best systems available, and those really couldn’t stack up to their PC counterparts in performance.
“If Apple continues down this one-stop-shopping model, vendors will continue to bail on Apple.”
this is one guy’s opinion in an independent book (not related to adobe) before the G5s.
that said apple needs market share and they should stop stepping on the toes of their developers by competing with them.
I have worked for years on support on 95 and 98 clients, lately switching to XP. My God it takes a hell of an effort to create a decent working XP client in a big network. Recently I started to work at another company on NT4 workstations, which are supposed to need less maintenance. In privat I am using a Mac. Many, many IT people would lose their Job if companies would change to decent clients, why are people argueing about speed anyway, if the speed is not supported by an easy to maintain OS? I don’t get it. Speed doesn’t justify a poorly designed OS.
lolololollzzz the author of ‘photoshop for dummies’ recommends a PC for dummies !
/troll
The G3 when it came out was an excellent CPU. In fact PowerComputing was set to come out with a 250MHz and 275MHz G3 systems in August 1997, but then Apple shut down the clones. Apple ended up releasing 233MHz and 266MHz systems in November of 1997.
Then Apple moved to the G4 in October 1999 at the mighty speed of 350MHz (sarcasm). But since Motorola didn’t ramp up the G4 like they were supposed to, Apple had to stick with the G3 in the low-end. I don’t really think because of the G4s short-comings that you can blame the G3 for that, as it should’ve been removed from their line-up years ago, or just allowed to ramp up as high as they could go (there were times when IBM had a G3 running at a higher clock speed than the G4, but because the G4 was lower, Apple had to stick with slower G3s in the low-end)
“stop with the Athlon64 bit. We’re talking the fastest chips from Apple(IBM), AMD and Intel that are obtainable TODAY.
” so put down the crack pipe…Apple has a fast and good machine, yes. but it does not even come close to being “a decent bit faster” then top of the line opteron.”
Well, I know one computer genius who would disagree with you. When Dr. Varadarajan was asked why he chose to build a G5 cluster, rather than opting for one using Intel or AMD processors, he responded…
“Both are fairly nice, but they’re expensive. First, it didn’t pass the price/performance ratio test. Opteron doesn’t do what the G5 does. 4Gflops at peak, the G5 is twice that. The Itanium is phenomenally efficient, but only at 1.5Ghz, not the 2Ghz. The #4 is a 8.6Terafllop Itanium II cluster (on 2000 procs).”
The first G3s were good for the time. But that didn’t last long. By the time it got to 300Mhz, it was already losing ground against the PII, because the latter had a better FPU unit. Anyway, Apple hasn’t had a really competitive CPU since that time, except maybe for a very short period after the introduction of the G4.
This is just Adobe people being angry at Apple for putting up a couple of competing products. That’s all it is.
If PC’s are so much faster, can someone tell me why Virginia Tech selected the G5 for the Terascale Cluster? Someone? Anyone? In my opinion, the existence of this machine simply gives the lie to the ridiculous performance advantage claims being made on behalf of x86 machines.
Its stupid to compare the price/performance of the G5 cluster to a regular G5 machine. They got a *damn* good deal on those machines. The cost of the cluster was 5.2 million. Of that, 2 million was infrastructure, so about 3.2 million was left for the machine. That’s about $2910 per machine. The closest thing you can get to the VaTech cluster config costs $5150 at the Apple Store. If you strip out some stuff that you can’t at the Apple Store (basically graphics card, keyboard, CD-RW drive, etc) you could shave about $400 of that price. That’s still $4750. Then you still have to factor in the price of the brand-new Mellanox Infiniband interconnect, which adds a minimum of several hundred to the price. They got a *damn* good deal on those systems, nothing close to what a normal person would get.
Actually VT says they paid regular educational prices on the G5.
I agree that the comparison between Big Mac and a boxed G5 is inappropriate and inadequate. But VT did not get a special deal.
And they also didn’t strip out any components or parts. (They did add their own RAM though.)
Why doesn’t adobe make their products so that they don’t require so many resources?? Oh, that’s right, it would take some freakin’ brainpower! Panther kicks ass, and I’m a WinXP user!
Man these threads are starting to really annoy me. Are we not supposed to be using computers to get work done? Does it really matter which machine anyone uses if they are able to perform their job functon?
I am sick to my stomach to be in the PC camp right now for all you ever read about is people saying that they want to have a choice. Well some people made their choice and they chose Apple, so why does it bother you people that someone chose a Mac?
That’s about $2910 per machine. The closest thing you can get to the VaTech cluster config costs $5150 at the Apple Store.
I’m able to reach something close to the Virginia Tech configuration, minus an additional 3.5GB of RAM, for $2493 at the educational price, though this includes a Radeon 9600 Pro and DVD/CD-RW drive. RAM for the dual 2GHz G5 costs $92 for 512MB at crucial.com, bringing the total cost that I can configure up to $3130. You suggest a $400 discount from the store price for stripping out the video card, optical drive, not sending a keyboard, etc, which would bring the per-node price to $2730, which leaves ~$180 per machine for the interconnect. I don’t think it’s too hard to believe that the only discounts Apple was giving on the cluster were their standard educational discount and for shipping the nodes without optical drives/keyboards/etc.
MS sucks, Dell sucks, IBM pc’s are good but cost the same as an apple. Home Pc’s are good when you are prepared to face problems with hardware that isnt properly supported. I recently owned 2 dell machines Inspiron and Precision dual Xeon and both produce bluescreens in XP occasionally as well as the inspirons’ seemingly random hangs which did in fact occur less after upgrade to XP from 2k. Apple’s are expensive but worth the price to avoid the hassle in the long run. If Apple is more successful, the hardware should be cheaper to produce in larger quantities and they can offer better pricing to consumers. At the moment though it seems to be a case of “Pick your poison” with operating systems. OSX is great but ppl complain about hardware pricing and the amount of updates. Linux updates even more often and its free, but is missing a lot of the software for home users if its not Jerry-rigged. Windows is downright terrible and needs to be re-architected which would put them in the same position as Apple or linux. Linux isnt quite ready but its coming. If you take a huge evaluation, which platform is right for you? Do you care more about games? Reliability? User Interface? Everything needs to be weighed in these days. Write it all down in a checklist, you may come up with a result that you least expect. Weighing in my options led me to the Mac when i thought Linux was the best option.
If apple would play a bit nicer with OSS maybe they could help out The Gimp or perhaps Blender so we wouldn’t have to use Photoshop anymore…funny how that works. Adobe has some pretty good stuff, but software is already a dying model…pro-sumers [i.e. fanboys and hobbiest] made up the largest number of sales of programs like photoshop. The thing’s been out for years, the basics have been pretty well cloned…and if you’re a newbie, you don’t got the skilz for what you’re missing anyway. <p>
Adobe is also the victim of the down ecomomy…more so than the others. Their model is to sell to everyone with a DV camera so we can all make lots of movies on vacations of our cute kids…Yeah right, they obviously aren’t living in the real world where you just got a pay cut, hours increased, and are lucky to See your kids let alone afford a vacation or a new DV cam.<p>
I am still to see a blue screen or a fatal crash caused by the OS (not some crappy application) in the past 7-8 months.
That’s it exactly, fool.
Crappy applications are NOT supposed to take out the OS. If they do the OS was poorly designed.
If Apple bought something to sell against Photoshop it would probably be from Corel.
how corporations will say things like PCs are faster than Macs for their own PR and BS, but they will never recommend anyone actually purchase the PCs they are talking about. They are recommending people buy their software, that’s all.
The Athlon64 chips have been available for months, but where can I buy a PC with one in it? Its the only thing that makes a PC as fast or faster than a Mac today, with the G5. Macs are NOT slow by any standards.
And did somebody forget that old 64-bit architectures still exist? I bet some Alpha system would beat the pants off most PCs today. We’re not in kansas anymore, Dorthy. Which is probably why all the corporations are lying to us, not just the sleazy ones.
In a year anyway. Just like every other hardware shootout, soon it doesn’t matter. Best to go with the one that looks best in your office. Either way, if your compile takes 30 minutes or 28 minutes, you want to have something nice to look at in the mean time.
Calm down people.
I’m afraid by the nerds who consider that their computers is obsolte 3 months after they buy it (or should I say _BEFORE_ they buy it ).
I use a Celeron 300Mhz with Linux and WindowMaker for my desktop, and it’s very good for me.
Adobe is not the #1 third party software house on the Mac side. That’s Microsoft.
I was starting to agree with you until you said “what does that extra $500 buy u? slower crappy operating system, that’s what.”
Please,
okay, XP is nice but Panther is way better. So don’t spew your FUD okay! As for your harware argument, you may be right but I would put the quality of an Emac against a 300 dollar PC anyday.
Anyway, and the fact that you think the P4 is the best processor really shows your ignorance, sorry buddy but right now the P4 is the bottom or the barrel. Will they be there a year from now, maybe not but right now both the G5 and the Opteron are way better!
Get real, get a life, and get a mac.
You won’t go back…trust me,
* )
“if u are aspirin artist, u probably don’t have money. so why buy mac? what do u really need for adobe photoshop and illustrator? do you need $1000 iMac? do u need $4000 G5? no, u can buy $200 dell. here is what u get for $200:
Dimension 2400 P4 2.2GHz
128MB RAM
40GB HDD
48X CD-ROM ”
And if you are a proffesional designer that is a crappy set up that will never cut it.
“athlon 64 and optoron are crappy processors and only run at 2GHz. intel will break 4GHz barrier before end of year, just u wait. they are best processor makers 4 sure”
That was just dumb.
Well you show pretty well that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I was running a pretty decent PC and UPGRADED to an ibook that runs at 800mhz and it does everything my PC did just as well except that the operating system is much more stable and I can do all the things that I could do in Linux on it AND run photoshop and flash native.
If you don’t like Macs because they are ‘too expensive’ fine, but you really have no idea what you’re talking about when you talk about how many GHZ one machine runs at over another. MHZ isn’t like miles per hour. It’s not a constant. It’s a falsity.
which leaves ~$180 per machine for the interconnect.
>>>>>>>
Have you *seen* the networking hardware on this thing? 20 gigabit Mellanox Infiniband, 240 port Cisco GigE switch, etc. That’s a hell of a lot of hardware for $180 a node. The numbers are really hard to believe. The guys behind it aren’t terribly impressive either. Have you seen their presentation? They refer to MacOS X as a “FreeBSD-based” system! Maybe I just don’t “get it.”
Its really irritatiing when people compare this thing to other machines on the Top 500. This system cuts a whole lot of corners. Take the RAM, for example. They cut corners by using regular DDR-SDRAM, instead of registered ECC SDRAM. With 1100 nodes, that means they’ll be getting several memory errors per day, which they make up for with a sophisticated software-based error detection mechanism. This machine may be fast, but its not the serious kind of hardware they are comparing it to.
You don’t suppose the fact that Apple has based its entire display technology and native document/printing system on Adobe’s PDF format (without paying fees or royalties) might have something to do with this? I’ll be there’s an interesting story behind the scenes there…
What a laugh.
Even here at OS News, we still get people who think a P4 2.4 is faster then a G4 at 1.2.
This is like comparing a Honda 4 cylinder engine that can rev to 10,000 rpm, vs. a Corvette V8 that turns over at 5,000 rpm.
PC people do some benchmarks of your own. you will see for yourself a PIII at half the speed beats a P4. The Pentium M, ( an improved PIII), is the best processor Intel sells. It clocks SLOWER than a P4.
Plus, the P4 runs hotter and uses more juice, which will shorten it average lifespan.
Great for Intel, you can burn out your P4 faster, forcing you to buy a new computer.
What do you know about a computer, when you know it’s Ghz rating?
Nothing!
besides GIMP (which apple could build on the way it did safari) there is another software, however commercial.
http://www.idruna.com/photogenicshdr.html
Even does things PS can’t eg. higher than 8bit image editing. However, I still prefer PS by far hope it doesnt come to that.
This is not the first time Adobe (Apple’s #1 third party software house) pushes its customers towards the PC.
I always thought that the #1 third party Mac software house is Microsoft which hires more Mac developers. Well, I learn some new things everyday.
Oh, on the topic, when the G5s just came out, it was priced almost the same as their PC counterparts, sometimes more cheaper. But times had change, G5s are still priced the same, yet PCs reduced in price, increase in speed rather dramatically. If Apple wants to play this price-performance game, they have to be more aggressive in their pricing. Which with their niche position, they are relunctant to do so.
You PeeCee folks never cease to amaze me. For years you’ve criticized Apple for having slow processors. Now, with on giant leap, Apple has unleashed a system that smokes just about everything available in the Intel/AMD world, and you still complain. Get a grip!
Personally, I would love to see Apple come out with a full-featured professional photo editing application. I’m sure it would kick the living daylights out of the overrated, overpriced, and (in my experience) crash-prone Photoshop.
I can’t understand why Adobe would tell its customers which computer to purchase. Most products are available for Windows/Macs: Photoshop, Acrobat ….. The professionals doing this for a living are sure to chose the computer which meets thier needs.
I could understand Adobe saying Photoshop is superior to GIMP or Pagemaker is better than Quark both for PR, advertising, and in sales meetings. Telling customers what computer to buy doesn’t influence their business model…. unless they plan to stop making all software for Macs.
You know, I don’t think it matters what OS you’re running.
Or what CPU you’re running.
You know why?
Because all of you guys are wasting your time posting on some internet forum. The fastest CPU/OS in the world couldn’t make you any more efficient.
The productivity bottleneck is almost always human. Humans are slow, often poorly trained, and always give me the blue screen of death. Most of my computer related problems are not due to computers — but rather humans. People spend all their time getting in each other’s ways that it’s little wonder precious little ever gets done.
This is no business of Adobe, its just someone’s opinion being blown all out of proportion. Really, whoever brought it up should know that. For example, if someone from the US speaks his opinion that doesn’t mean all of the USA thinks the same.
Touche!!! 😛
Now, with on giant leap, Apple has unleashed a system that smokes just about everything available in the Intel/AMD world, and you still complain. Get a grip!
It does, doesn’t it? Wow. Perhaps AMD and Intel should just announce bankruptcy now, and Dell, HP, etc. should just become third party hardware makers for Apple because since the G5, the PC world lost its ability to make anything faster and cheaper.
Oh, what a sad day.
Adobe is a horrible suite of applications that are memory hogs and cpu hogs.
I wish they would get rid of all the products. At MS software does not use all the system memory and the horrible PDF format…
u are wrong in so many ways.
>Even here at OS News, we still get people who think a P4 2.4 is faster than a G4 at 1.2
WRONG buddy, g4 is at 1GHz. P4 is at 2.2GHz. u preach “MHz myth” which is a lie. yes if apple made 2.2GHz g4 it would be faster than P4 BUT THEY DON’T they only make 2GHz g5 as fastest processor. but P4 clock speed is OVER twice that of g4, and u think g4 would be faster rotfl
>This is like comparing a Honda 4 cylinder engine that can rev to 10,000 rpm, vs. a Corvette V8 that turns over at 5,000 rpm.
cars are cars, computer are computrers. stop comparing the two, they are not the same. where is the 4 vs 8 cyl in g4 vs P4? P4 is 32 bits processor and so is g4, so that isn’t it. P4 has WAAAAY faster bus (800MHz) than g4 (100MHz) so that isn’t it. well i thunk u out of options, P4 2.2GHz IS FASTER than g4 1GHz. lie all u want but no one will believe u as u cling to your slower inferior mac hardware
>And if you are a proffesional designer that is a crappy set up that will never cut it.
then once u are rich proffesional designer u buy a mac. but as aspirin artist u buy cheap, fast Dell, and who knows, maybe wonderful dell will convince u to buy dell that is even faster than g4. u could buy duel 3.2GHz XEON system, that would be cheaper and faster than 2GHz g5, and run all the same software.
i don’t get it, if it’s faster and runs the same software, why not pay LESS for it than slower, more expensive mac. plz explain i really want to know. only argument mac users have for macs is “MHz myth” and “my computer means I drive a better car than u” well computers are not cars u can’t roll up in front of a club in ur g5 mac and get chicks, it just sits on ur desk and eats space and money
Even here at OS News, we still get people who think a P4 2.4 is faster then a G4 at 1.2.
Hmmm, okay….
PC people do some benchmarks of your own. you will see for yourself a PIII at half the speed beats a P4.
I don’t see you dishing out benchmarks prooving that 1.2GHz G4 is faster than 2.4Ghz Pentium 4.
The Pentium M, ( an improved PIII), is the best processor Intel sells. It clocks SLOWER than a P4.
Plus, the P4 runs hotter and uses more juice, which will shorten it average lifespan.
It is their best processor. But it has nothing to do with Pentium III, famous for its lack of heat management (in comparison with PowerPC). Sure, it was made by the exact same team that invented Pentium III in Haifa, Israel, but it isn’t the same thing.
just so you know…which apparently you don’t, there are no longer royalties associated with PDF.
Apple is not steeling anything from Adobe. why do you think Open Office can make an export to PDF feature? because they don’t have to pay Adobe for it.
then once u are rich proffesional designer u buy a mac. but as aspirin artist u buy cheap, fast Dell
Aspirin artist, eh? Do you work for Bayer?
Let me ask you rowel, are you an artist? Do you own a Wacom tablet? Have you ever used Painter? Didn’t think so…
Believe it or not, most artists can be quite content with a slower G3 system. Now granted, this system will probably be running OS 9 or earlier, not the bloated, resource hungry OS X. But it will do *exactly* what they want it to *exactly* how they want it, so they don’t need some gargantuan dual Xeon monster.
and who knows, maybe wonderful dell will convince u to buy dell that is even faster than g4
Why would buying some crippled, bottom-of-the-barrel Dell system convince you to buy Dell again? Don’t you think it would be better to shell out more than $200 and buy a system that will last you awhile? Your entire post screams that you are concerned with the bottom line, and seem to have no care or concerns for anything else.
When your world view isn’t confined to that of a a pimple faced Dell-touting overclocking teenage hardware jockey, you’re not concerned about having the latest-and-greatest, or the best bottom line. You want the computer you need to best accomplish the job.
u could buy duel 3.2GHz XEON system, that would be cheaper and faster than 2GHz g5, and run all the same software.
Perhaps it would run the same software, but chances are if you’re an artist and you’re learning CG in school, the classes will use Macs. Suddenly every keyboard shortcut you’ve ever learned is different, because PCs don’t have a sensibly placed command key. The interface is markedly different, as is the organization of files.
Take it from someone who works in the creative market… it’s all Mac. No amount of bottom-line touting will change that. Macs are here to stay, like it or leave it. The next time you walk into a magazine, a music studio, or your local newspaper, tell me how many PCs you see. Chances are it will be a big fat zero.
— Raou
Macintosh Systems Administrator
This book is FOR DUMMIES.
’nuff said.
“Believe it or not, most artists can be quite content with a slower G3 system. Now granted, this system will probably be running OS 9 or earlier, not the bloated, resource hungry OS X. But it will do *exactly* what they want it to *exactly* how they want it, so they don’t need some gargantuan dual Xeon monster.”
I however, am, and yup, I’m more than happy working on my ‘old’ and ‘slow’ XP 2500+. Just wish I had more RAM. And Painter – oy. Dunno how the Mac version may run, but the PC version’s -terribly- laggy and unresponsive at times.
OK… Some benchmarks for you, comparing a P4 3 Ghz, a DP 1.42 GHz G4, and a DP 2.0 Ghz G5… and then later, throwing a DP Xeon into the mix…
The asterik denotes the fastest computer in each test.
Cinebench 2003 CPU render (higher is better)
P4 – 346
G4 – 246
G5 – 522* (software benchmark still in beta for G5)
Adobe After Effects render (lower is better)
P4 – 698
G4 – 593
G5 – 355*
Photoshop 7 (MP aware) (lower numbers better)
P4 – 44
G4 – 35
G5 – 28*
Photoshop 7 (Non-MP aware) (lower numbers better)
P4 – 59
G4 – 73
G5 – 53*
Bryce 3D Render (lower numbers better)
P4 – 38
G4 – 37
G5 – 22*
All from Barefeats, by the way.
Now…. the same model G4s and G5s vs Xeon 3.06 DP, from Dell, I think… from PC Mag tests.
Acrobat test 1: (smaller number better)
Xeon – 1:35
G4 – 1:42
G5 – 1:24*
Second Acrobat test (smaller number is better)
Xeon – 3:12
G4 – 2:27
G5 – 1:47*
Newtek Lightwave 3D (smaller number is better)
Xeon – 9:08*
G4 – 14:05
G5 – 9:22
Sorenson Squeeze (smaller number is better)
Xeon – 8:44
G4 – 7:12
G5 – 5:22*
Avid Express Encode
Xeon – 813
G4 – 726
G5 – 620*
What blows me away in all these benchmarks isn’t the fact that the G5 wins all but one handily. It’s that the slow G4, with it’s crippled bus, manages to hold its own against a supposedly much faster processor.
I mean, really, Rowel…. that can’t be, can it?!?
I do know that if we add AMD to the mix, that the Opteron makes it a real horserace, especially if rumors of much faster G5 chips being in the pipeline are true. But really, at the moment, the P-IV isn’t even in the game… Even the stauchest Intel advocate couldn’t hold that position….
rowel? don’t you get tired of these threads?
i completely agree that for the price PCs easily benchmark faster then Macs for the money.
But your constant raving on and on about Dell…even as a PC user, I’d like break your fingers I’m so tired of seeing your rants.
Dell’s are the trailers/trailer-parks of computers.
You don’t see people living in trailers running around “hey I live in a trailer park everyone!!!”
so why don’t you give it a rest, and leave the mac folk alone.
if anyone gave me an ibook or powerbook, i would be very gleeful.
till then i’ll be satisfied with AthlonXP 1800.
He’s trolling with his AOLspeak in pretty much every thread so just ignore him. He’ll eventually go away.
Dells are cheap, but (aside from certain laptops which shall remain nameless) they’re dependable and get the job done. They’re like the 3 bedroom 2 bathroom split-levels you see all over the country. They’re not sexy, but they do the job, are relatively comfortable, and nobody should be ashamed to own one.
Let’s re-hash the same tired crap over and over again.
Tell me why it is that at the recent Photoshop conference in Miami more than 60% of the machines were Macs.
Why were at least 70% of the personal laptops Macs?
Why were all the PC people I spoke to talking about switching?
Why, during a presentation from an Adobe employee, on After Effects when his high-powered Dell laptop (M60, I asked) started to have all sorts of “issues” did he ask if anyone in the audience if they had a Mac he could borrow?
Use what you like and get your work done and just SHUT UP!
“P4 has WAAAAY faster bus (800MHz) than g4 (100MHz)”
The P4 just has a quad pumped 200Mhz bus, and the G4 actually has a 167Mhz bus. Not really that far apart, though the fact the G4 can’t do dual or quad on the 167 makes the P4s faster.
If Apple continues down this one-stop-shopping model, vendors will continue to bail on Apple.
If Apple produces better software than those third parties that bail, the professional end user will say, “screw you, I’m moving to Apple FooBah Pro 1.1”, the third party will lose and Apple will win. Worse, they’ll will also give Apple a greater leverage along the lines of, “Buy a PowerMac and Screen and get FooBah Pro 1.1 Free!”. Not only will they kill themselves but kill their PC product line as people will see the great deal Apple can offer.
As for x86, I Scribus is coming along very nicely, however, I would love to see a a Dreamweaver and Freehand clone along the same lines as Scribus. If they contain atleast 90% of the features of the commercial counterparts and allow plugins to be produced easily, you will find that there will an adoption by people who want to use an x86, can’t stand Windows but find that there is a lack of applications on the non-Windows operating systems on offer.
The problem with Adobe is that they’re a Microsoft suck-up. Nothing would please me more than them going out of business. Yes, I know it would be taking pleasure in someone elses misfortune, however, I would love fait to deal all those who don’t produce *NIX/*BSD compatible applications and/or work with wine to bring about compatibility.
Dells are cheap, but (aside from certain laptops which shall remain nameless) they’re dependable and get the job done. They’re like the 3 bedroom 2 bathroom split-levels you see all over the country. They’re not sexy, but they do the job, are relatively comfortable, and nobody should be ashamed to own one.
Or one could purchase an IBM Think Centre desktop PC which is alot easier to manage and restore (from and end user perspective), also, amazingly enough you actually get a customer support representative who can speak English without a fake/real American twang.
Users need to be told that in the computer industry that “you get what you pay for” is more true than any other. You buy an el-cheapo computer, there is a downside, either poorer quality or less expandibility.
As for eMac/iMac and PowerMac, 90% of users can be easily served with that is available, heck, even a PIII 1Ghz is suitable for 90% of peoples daily work. The only thing that has been rising is memory requirements, CPU requirements have remained static whilst Intel and AMD have been hyping up the clock speed with end users thinking that for magical reason, if they upgrade their CPU, their crappy graphics, slow hard drive and lack of memory are suddenly fixed.
Window 2000 can run on a PIII with 512MB VERY nicely, same goes for MacOS X running on an eMac 1Ghz with 512MB. Memory increase is a normal thing but people who think CPU speed increase = over all computer speed increase really need to get their brain examined by a professional.
I read that a UNI AMD FX51 beat a DUAL G5 2GHZ at all except one benchmark. It was posted on about a month ago I think.
The IQ’s around here are dropping like flies. I have never seen so many stupid, idiotic posts in my life(outside of slashdot). I just might have to give Georgie boy a call so we can revoke 1st Amendment rights so get can get back to constructive commentary and opinions rather than the slashdot festering stink hole trash being thrown about here now. People seem to think the OSnews is FoxNews so they keep throwing out the trash here.
No my rant is out of they way;
I don’t think that Ted Alspac’s comments are not without merit and probably is not alone with that concept at Adobe. Apple Computers continued behavior and drive to expand its in-house software line(original development and buy outs of software companies) will continue to alienate 3rd party software developers. This can be Self Destructive.
For example; as a developer why would you develop a video software program(or continue to develop) when Apple has 4 products in Video software market covering each level of that product spectrum. Now complain about Premiere all you want, that isn’t the only video program to be driven out of the Apple market. Don’t get me wrong, I like Final Cut and Soundtrack and the software team behind those products know there shit and have the best interface for that kind of product(my opinion).
The question is what happens when Apple expands its software library to include, Web Development, Desktop Publishing, Illustration, 2D Animation(Flash and incarnates), Spreadsheet, Word Processing, Diagramming, and Image Development? Do you think with the way the Apple community works(i.e. rapid adoption by anything made by Apple) that Adobe, Corel, Macromedia, Microsoft and Quark will continue to develop their software on the Mac platform with Apple holding and unfair competitive advantage(they already own or account for the majority of the retail sales, online retail sales, wholesale distribution, and hardware manufacturing) I don’t think so. This is the concern at Adobe as well as other software developers about Apple.
Actually this would lead to Apple getting slapped with an easy to convict anti-trust lawsuit. How you ask, simple, in this scenario, Apple would own outright or control/account for; the OS, Middleware, Development kit, majority of the software sales, Computer Hardware(not peripheral), Server Hardware, Traditional Retail Sales(Apple Stores), Online Retail Sales, the Distribution channel for Software & hardware and Service & support.
This is not a defense for Microsoft’s behavior that some of your feeble minds are half-ass thinking about(another rant). Microsoft was never guilty of Anti-Trust by the standards set with the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T. They don’t own the distributors, they don’t own retail or online retail, they don’t own Dell, HP, Gateway, Sony, etc. They were and are guilty of Criminal Racketeering for abuses in the 90’s. But the Federal and State governments didn’t want send Bill Gates and company to spend 10-50 years in jail so they instead chose to abuse and weaken the Anti-Trust Laws in this country. This also would have required Microsoft to be shut down as well(imagine the chaos in that) The government would end up owning all of Microsoft’s property and selling to the highest bidder in auction which has always a been a slow process(and at this level every single politican in America would interfere for one reason or another slowing the auction process again. Linux fanboys will probably be delighted with those last 2 sentences.
I’m a PC user, never use Macs seriously, but I like MacOS X when I worked with it for a while.
If Adobe is developing for Mac and PC, they shouldn’t openly say what their preference of platform is. It’s not up to Adobe to say that. If so, they should stop developing for the Mac platform. Customers will decide. Secondly, speed isn’t everything. There’s also the computer use OUTSIDE Adobe’s little world.
It’s not fair to bash the Mac community like this
hmmm: The Athlon64 chips have been available for months, but where can I buy a PC with one in it?
The Aurora Extreme from Alienware:
http://www.alienware.com/system_pages/aurora_ddr.aspx
Falcon Northwest offers it as an option:
http://www.falcon-nw.com/config/build.asp
I’m not aware of any others.
For example; as a developer why would you develop a video software program(or continue to develop) when Apple has 4 products in Video software market covering each level of that product spectrum.
Apple doesn’t control the high end video software market, Avid does. Avid seems to be doing quite well despite Final Cut Express/Pro eating up the low end on the Mac side and Premiere eating up the low end on the Windows side.
— Raou
Apple doesn’t control the high end video software market, Avid does. Avid seems to be doing quite well despite Final Cut Express/Pro eating up the low end on the Mac side and Premiere eating up the low end on the Windows side.
Last I check, Final Cut 4 was 999$, if that’s not high end, then it’s a 600$ overpriced mid scale app(yes I know soundtrack is included) and shouldn’t include HD editing for a mid scale product. Apple produces Shake for high end editing. By the way , since when did midscale apps need HD for the not-available yet HD consumer and semi-pro video cameras. HD isn’t required here in the states till 2007.
To me Low end is the sub 100$ field, mid-end field is 100-400$, 400-1000$ is high end, 1000+$ is Studio Level.
“Or one could purchase an IBM Think Centre desktop PC which is alot easier to manage and restore (from and end user perspective), also, amazingly enough you actually get a customer support representative who can speak English without a fake/real American twang. ”
Where do you get this from? Experience? I don’t think so. The Mac has ALWAYS been easier to configure, run and maintain than any PC, from the older system architecture to todays OSs. Ask people who use both… Oh, I was just talking to my friend from Argentina, guess who he has a job for? MICROSOFT tech support. True, his English is excellent, but he has an accent, prefers Linux to MS… it’s all his job.
“Users need to be told that in the computer industry that “you get what you pay for” is more true than any other. You buy an el-cheapo computer, there is a downside, either poorer quality or less expandibility. ”
Have you spoken to AppleCare or the local user support groups? A friend of mine actually prefers her iBook… as a user. She worked for IBM and was in the marker to purchase a laptop to do DV while on a trip to France and Slovania. She came over to my place before she went, I told her a few
tips, and away she went. No problems for over a year in Europe. Oh, that was Jaguar…
“As for eMac/iMac and PowerMac, 90% of users can be easily served with that is available, heck, even a PIII 1Ghz is suitable for 90% of peoples daily work. The only thing that has been rising is memory requirements, CPU requirements have remained static whilst Intel and AMD have been hyping up the clock speed with end users thinking that for magical reason, if they upgrade their CPU, their crappy graphics, slow hard drive and lack of memory are suddenly fixed.”
I use a 1G PIII w/512 MB Ram and I still prefer to use my Powerbook G3/333 w/320M Ram. (Yeah, it’s slower but it doesn’t crash as much. Hiccup as much…) Inconsistant behavior has led me to remove my Handspring sync from the PC (WinXP). The USB bus is so inconsistant (I always had to go to Device Manager et al to configure when the device becomes unrecognizable etc..) My friend with a Clio (spellink) couldn’t get his to sync w/XP Home (Oh, should he be using Pro? or Media Edition?).
“Window 2000 can run on a PIII with 512MB VERY nicely, same goes for MacOS X running on an eMac 1Ghz with 512MB. Memory increase is a normal thing but people who think CPU speed increase = over all computer speed increase really need to get their brain examined by a professional.”
I guess if you only use one app at a time. OS 8.6 is a speed demon and almost never crashes… I use it on my old Mac clone (w/G3 upgrade). In fact it’s now my music studio computer.
Please get experience with the platforms you are commenting on… No platform is perfect. Remember the old adage… Never ASSUME…
Microsoft’s PR should read NOT Where do you want to go toady but Where WE (MS) want to take you today.
“I have never seen so many stupid, idiotic posts in my life (outside of slashdot).”
“I don’t think that Ted Alspac’s comments are not without merit and probably is not alone with that concept at Adobe. ”
It would be best to check that your own sentences make sense before criticizing other people’s. 😉
“Or one could purchase an IBM Think Centre desktop PC which is alot easier to manage and restore (from and end user perspective), also, amazingly enough you actually get a customer support representative who can speak English without a fake/real American twang. ”
Where do you get this from? Experience? I don’t think so. The Mac has ALWAYS been easier to configure, run and maintain than any PC, from the older system architecture to todays OSs. Ask people who use both… Oh, I was just talking to my friend from Argentina, guess who he has a job for? MICROSOFT tech support. True, his English is excellent, but he has an accent, prefers Linux to MS… it’s all his job.
“Users need to be told that in the computer industry that “you get what you pay for” is more true than any other. You buy an el-cheapo computer, there is a downside, either poorer quality or less expandibility. ”
Have you spoken to AppleCare or the local user support groups? A friend of mine actually prefers her iBook… as a user. She worked for IBM and was in the marker to purchase a laptop to do DV while on a trip to France and Slovania. She came over to my place before she went, I told her a few
tips, and away she went. No problems for over a year in Europe. Oh, that was Jaguar…
“As for eMac/iMac and PowerMac, 90% of users can be easily served with that is available, heck, even a PIII 1Ghz is suitable for 90% of peoples daily work. The only thing that has been rising is memory requirements, CPU requirements have remained static whilst Intel and AMD have been hyping up the clock speed with end users thinking that for magical reason, if they upgrade their CPU, their crappy graphics, slow hard drive and lack of memory are suddenly fixed.”
I use a 1G PIII w/512 MB Ram and I still prefer to use my Powerbook G3/333 w/320M Ram. (Yeah, it’s slower but it doesn’t crash as much. Hiccup as much…) Inconsistant behavior has led me to remove my Handspring sync from the PC (WinXP). The USB bus is so inconsistant (I always had to go to Device Manager et al to configure when the device becomes unrecognizable etc..) My friend with a Clio (spellink) couldn’t get his to sync w/XP Home (Oh, should he be using Pro? or Media Edition?).
“Window 2000 can run on a PIII with 512MB VERY nicely, same goes for MacOS X running on an eMac 1Ghz with 512MB. Memory increase is a normal thing but people who think CPU speed increase = over all computer speed increase really need to get their brain examined by a professional.”
I guess if you only use one app at a time. OS 8.6 is a speed demon and almost never crashes… I use it on my old Mac clone (w/G3 upgrade). In fact it’s now my music studio computer.
Please get experience with the platforms you are commenting on… No platform is perfect. Remember the old adage… Never ASSUME…
Microsoft’s PR should read NOT Where do you want to go toady but Where WE (MS) want to take you today.