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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Editorial: You've been punk'd!

AppleLust:

Yes, I've been punk'd. Remember all the Expos with the demos of Photoshop up against a Wintel? Recall how they rendered everything faster? How Mathematica crunched numbers like crazy and the CEO would come out and talk of the wonders of the Mac? Remember the Intel bunny being burned? Yes, they poo-poo'd that this week and laughed at ol' times on stage. I wasn't amused - it was a badge of honor. Recall all the talk about CISC and RISC and all that? Pipelines and bottlenecks and speed increases and how it took two Intel chips to do the work of one IBM PowerPC chip? That OS X was written to take advantage of the power of the PowerPC?

It was all a joke, a big "gotcha!" I feel lied to frankly. Or else, it was all true - I wasn't dreaming after all!! - and now the wonders of the PPC RISC are getting smaller in the mirror. It was all true - Photoshop does render faster on a PPC. But guess what? It doesn't matter - performance doesn't matter. That is the message.

That's not the message. It was never true. That entire time period was one big marketing lie, just like the claims about the Power Mac G5 being the world's fastest PC. Hogwash, and proven wrong time and time again. Welcome to the real world, friend.

So either it was all lies, and we were fooled, our Macs weren't better as were led to believe, or else it was all true and we must settle for second best, or, for us, as good as it gets when we are used to having it very well. Take your choice, there are no other options: you were fooled or must give up the best.

It's the former: You were fooled. And come on, that's obvious, isn't it? Most Mac backers can now admit that the various benefits of a Mac over a PC didn't really include performance. But how can that be your only problem with this whole thing? Aren't Macs about much more than just performance? If a Mac were simply faster than a PC, I would never have been interested in the platform. That's probably true of most people.

So you think you've been punk'd? I think you're just immature. And you're worrying about the wrong thing. The PC's been faster than the Mac for a long time. Look to the other advantages of the Mac for solace and know now that Apple has made the right choice if performance--and battery lie, and feature set--are what's important to you.

[ Posted at 8:49 AM | Permalink ]