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Mactels vs. PC Competition


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They do make some good points. But, as I've said a few dozen times now, I think you have to compare this to one of the new Lenovo core duo's, or another similar brand. (Although I do wish the price was lower) I don't think Apple cares much about Acer competing with them, they care more about perhaps Lenovo, Dell, HP, etc. Oh, plus, that Acer doesn't come with OS X, but we might see it hacked again of course.

 

Also, this laptop is 1lb heavier, which is a deal breaker for me. I consider myself strong (for a woman at least), but I'm not lugging around a 6.6lb laptop.

Edited by cyrana
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Here's an interesting comparison between the new MacBook Pro and the old Powerbook, as well as the new Acer Core Duo laptop. Check it out.

 

These are the kind of arguments we're going to be seeing in the days to come (as referenced in my last article).

 

What do you think?

 

it's gonna come down to whether MacBook Pro will be able to dualboot into Windows and OS X. That's really what's separating between the MacBook and the rest of Core Duo laptops (aside from the design). The Acer laptop does look fairly nice (especially the carbon fiber model)

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Here's an interesting comparison between the new MacBook Pro and the old Powerbook, as well as the new Acer Core Duo laptop. Check it out.

 

These are the kind of arguments we're going to be seeing in the days to come (as referenced in my last article).

 

What do you think?

 

wow! thats amazing!! when os x can run a normal x86 pc than the acer is..... wow more powerfull than a macbook. yeah great notebook. ok. the design of the macbook is better...

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For the price of the Acer I would buy a MacBook Pro and run both Mac and Windows

 

I have to side with Cyrana with weight my T40 is only 4.5lb, lugging around 6.6lb may not seem like much but it does make a difference.

 

I was hoping to see a lower price for the MacBook Pro :)

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Cyrana, I agree totally on the weight aspect. For the last couple of months I've been using a tiny Sony PGC4F laptop which I chose purely because it's less than 3lbs all-in yet has good performance, almost every feature you could want (plus some you don't) and a very nearly full-size keyboard. I hate Sony because of their media policy but in this case there wasn't any competition. I travel a great deal and I don't want to lug around anything that weighs over 4lbs. The Sony can manage an entire transatlantic flight on battery - not many other machines can do that.

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Another reason to develop a commercial product allowing dual boot on a MacTel is to get rid of Windows-based virus/adware/malware. This is the hypothetical scenario: The (happy) MacBook owner is working under WinXP and realizes that got a nasty adware app that refuses to go with the standard tools. So instead of losing hours of productive work trying to get rid of the pest she reboots (or switches?) to MacOS and runs a program that easily detects and deletes the unwanted program and its ancillary files. This savvy user will resumes her work under XP in much less time than is required today.

 

To make this happen there are significant issues to solve, like the hypothetical MacOS-adware/virus killer program with the capability to log in and work with NTFS in order to gain access to the files, but to begin with, the owner of that very computer can be authenticated as the legitimate owner of every single file (either under NTFS or MacOS).

 

I am not suggesting to use a MacTel as the "ultimate Windows environment" but many people would consider that such solution could allow them to be more productive by using the software they have under the required OS, with the added bonus of easing one of the must annoying chores that a current PC user has to do (virus removal). It is just the way we use a convertible car: on bright days we put the top down and when things get nasty we put it back on. But it is still the same vehicle.

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Since the pricing structure for the new machines appears to be identical to the existing line, Apple will have to try hard to make it seem they're offering more. They quote processor speeds as one selling point. Raw processor speed might attract the kids, but anyone who has used different processor architecture knows that Intel's clock speeds are not a true representation of the work they can do. Quote from Wikipedia -

 

"The design goal of the Pentium 4 was to scale to fast clock speeds, because consumers were beginning to purchase computers based on GHz ratings. To this extent the P4 appears to be a classic example of marketing concerns driving technological development. Intel used a deep instruction pipeline to implement this goal, which reduced the amount of real work that the Pentium 4 could do per clock cycle, compared to other CPUs". That philosphy hasn't changed much today. Even dual cores are only useful if the software can actually take full advantage of them.

 

I have a suspicion that this is why we're seeing less than sparkling benchmarks compared to expectations.

 

Come to think of it, years ago when I had a 20MHz 386 it seemed to fly compared to the 12MHz 286 it replaced. That DOS directory shot up the screen so fast I couldn't read it. Funny that the DOS directory command on my 3.4 GHz P4 is really not much faster, eh?

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That would be harddrive limitations IMO as reading the directory boils down to the speed of the harddrive. I dont think that has anything to do with the CPU speed really anymore. I think in order for CPU's to be able to do any real gruntwork beyond what they do in this day is to increase the Harddrives. I think their performance is just terrible and has not increased in any real major leaps. The only thing that causes any kinda speed jump that is actually noticable is that gigabyte iRam thing that they made but then to get any benifit from them you need to put in 2gb ram sticks and then raid it... Otherwise its pretty much worthless. So I guess there is not really going to be any MAJOR breakthrough's till the HDD speed goes up. I mean sure space space space is growing to stupid sizes but I would rather see a smaller drive with faster speeds that is halfway affordable. The readtimes have gone down slightly with NCQ drives but its nothing truly impressive given that the transfer speeds did not go up thats kind of a bummer. I would rather see higher transfer speeds and a good .6 or so faster harddrive. Then maybe things would start to change for the better. Just sickening to me I get mad about it all the time actually.....

 

Sucks. But what can you do but fork out a metric ton of money for a SATA Raptor at 10k RPM or a "sudo solid state" like the iRam.. BLAH!

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I think in order for CPU's to be able to do any real gruntwork beyond what they do in this day is to increase the Harddrives. I think their performance is just terrible and has not increased in any real major leaps.

My 15-year old Seagate ST-251 MFM 5.25" hard drive on a Western Digital 1006-SR2 ISA 16-bit controller card has a maximum throughput of about 650 KiloBytes per second. ;)

 

Hard drives have become much, much faster over the years with regards to transfer speed, but of course there will always be a physical limit to seek performance (this old Seagate has an average seek time of 65 ms, by the way).

 

PS: How funny, WD still has a PDF of the original user guide online, including the DOS debug command to execute the menu-driven low-level format utility on this card.

 

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/legacy/contr...rds/1006sr1.pdf

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