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lprovenI spent some time wandering around the West End today, not a usual practice for me these days.
I visited the Apple Store when the Macintels were new out, but I couldn't get near one. I'm happy to see the place is popular but it does reduce its utility as a demo centre!
But today I visited my former colleagues in Micro Anvika and got to play around with MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Mac Pros. I passed on the chance of iMacs.
By Jove. It's hard to tell when having few real apps to play with, but the things do seem very fast indeed!
Many years ago, MacUser asked me to review a then-high-end Mac. I demurred on the basis of not knowing enough Photoshop or whatever to really put the thing through its paces; my main uses were ClarisWorks, MS Office and so on. I did play with the machine for some time, though. The chap from MacUser asked me what I thought of it. I wibbled about its puissance a bit. He asked me if it felt quick, though, and I had to admit that it didn't. The MacOS 9 GUI was splendidly responsive but it didn't feel as quick as a rapid Pentium running WinNT. He was saddened but not surprised. Apparently, that was the normal response of PC types on high-end Macs.
I'm quite happy on my various PowerPC Macs and I've spent many days working on G5s. They're fine, but they still don't "feel fast". Throw raw CPU tasks at them and they do fine, but they somehow just don't feel as quick as a PC running (from my choice, these days) a trimmed-down Linux distro.
Well, by the hypothetical deities, the Intel ones do. I was quite taken aback. The MacBooks are massively more responsive-feeling than any G5 I've used or set up, and the Mac Pro felt blisteringly fast.
It's a hard thing to quantify. OS responsiveness is a somewhat nebulous thing, tricky to measure. Certainly taking any random old PC from 5-6 years ago and putting BeOS on it made it feel like a whole new computer, of vastly greater power, for example, because BeOS was specifically tuned for that, and it worked. BeOS makes your tired old moped of a computer feel like a superbike.
Well, from fifteen minutes of fiddling, the Mac Pro feels like a GSXR1000 with turbo and nitrous.
I'm impressed, I have to admit it.
I'm a suspicious sod, though. It makes me wonder...
NeXTstep has been running on x86 since 1993. A bit later, it was primarily an x86 OS.
I don't know how much stuff came across smoothly from 68030/68040 to 80486. I am sure there'd be big-endian/little-endian issues there, for example. I've read that some of the APIs deep inside OS X don't fit well on the PowerPC, that they are better suited to CISC chips than RISC.
Which makes me wonder if OS X86 is merely going back to older, better-optimised code.
Or, more cynically, if the move to x86 was always planned - as the maintenance of the x86 port suggests - and there were delays put into the GUI on PowerPC, to make it feel less responsive, so that these could be progressively lessened (to make each release a bit faster than its precessor) and finally removed altogether for the official x86 Macs.
Because they really do feel like the fastest Macs I've ever set hands upon by an order of magnitude. Astonishingly, impressively so.
And the Core and Core 2 chips really are not /that/ good. There wasn't much wrong with the G5, really. It was a good chip.
I smell a rat.
But I really want a Mac Pro now, too.
I visited the Apple Store when the Macintels were new out, but I couldn't get near one. I'm happy to see the place is popular but it does reduce its utility as a demo centre!
But today I visited my former colleagues in Micro Anvika and got to play around with MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Mac Pros. I passed on the chance of iMacs.
By Jove. It's hard to tell when having few real apps to play with, but the things do seem very fast indeed!
Many years ago, MacUser asked me to review a then-high-end Mac. I demurred on the basis of not knowing enough Photoshop or whatever to really put the thing through its paces; my main uses were ClarisWorks, MS Office and so on. I did play with the machine for some time, though. The chap from MacUser asked me what I thought of it. I wibbled about its puissance a bit. He asked me if it felt quick, though, and I had to admit that it didn't. The MacOS 9 GUI was splendidly responsive but it didn't feel as quick as a rapid Pentium running WinNT. He was saddened but not surprised. Apparently, that was the normal response of PC types on high-end Macs.
I'm quite happy on my various PowerPC Macs and I've spent many days working on G5s. They're fine, but they still don't "feel fast". Throw raw CPU tasks at them and they do fine, but they somehow just don't feel as quick as a PC running (from my choice, these days) a trimmed-down Linux distro.
Well, by the hypothetical deities, the Intel ones do. I was quite taken aback. The MacBooks are massively more responsive-feeling than any G5 I've used or set up, and the Mac Pro felt blisteringly fast.
It's a hard thing to quantify. OS responsiveness is a somewhat nebulous thing, tricky to measure. Certainly taking any random old PC from 5-6 years ago and putting BeOS on it made it feel like a whole new computer, of vastly greater power, for example, because BeOS was specifically tuned for that, and it worked. BeOS makes your tired old moped of a computer feel like a superbike.
Well, from fifteen minutes of fiddling, the Mac Pro feels like a GSXR1000 with turbo and nitrous.
I'm impressed, I have to admit it.
I'm a suspicious sod, though. It makes me wonder...
NeXTstep has been running on x86 since 1993. A bit later, it was primarily an x86 OS.
I don't know how much stuff came across smoothly from 68030/68040 to 80486. I am sure there'd be big-endian/little-endian issues there, for example. I've read that some of the APIs deep inside OS X don't fit well on the PowerPC, that they are better suited to CISC chips than RISC.
Which makes me wonder if OS X86 is merely going back to older, better-optimised code.
Or, more cynically, if the move to x86 was always planned - as the maintenance of the x86 port suggests - and there were delays put into the GUI on PowerPC, to make it feel less responsive, so that these could be progressively lessened (to make each release a bit faster than its precessor) and finally removed altogether for the official x86 Macs.
Because they really do feel like the fastest Macs I've ever set hands upon by an order of magnitude. Astonishingly, impressively so.
And the Core and Core 2 chips really are not /that/ good. There wasn't much wrong with the G5, really. It was a good chip.
I smell a rat.
But I really want a Mac Pro now, too.
