NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/comp/sys/mac/misc/13991

Internet Message Format | 1992-07-29 | 4.1 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!mips!darwin.sura.net!Sirius.dfn.de!zam103!djukfa11!asi509
From: [e-mail]
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Macs cost too much (NOT!)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 29 Jul 92 14:02:35 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>    <ajross.711133468@husc9>
 <[e-mail]> <ajross.711328520@husc9>
 <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
 <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]
Organization: KFA  Forschungszentrum Juelich
Lines: 72

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Edward V.
Wright) says:
>
>In <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>
>
>>Because I read the subject of this thread "Macs COST too much". Of course I
>>could compare a VW Rabbit to a Corvette to proof that american cars are
>better
>>than german.
>
>Your claim was not about cost, but about speed.  You chose an expensive,

Sorry, but comparing only cost or only speed is absolute nonsense. I can
compare the speed of equally priced machines or the cost of equally powered
machines, but comparing machine A to machine B because they are the bottom-
of-the-line machines of companies X and Y is stupid.

>top-of-the-line PC against the bottom-of-the-line Mac II to prove your
>point.  Not even Mr. Moon has been inane enough to suggest that you can
>buy a flow-blown 486 for the same price as a IIsi.
>
I don`t need a "full blown" 486 for this. In one of the latest MacWorld issues
the average price for a IIsi w 14" (13"?) color monitor was about $3000 with
5MB RAM and 105MB harddisk. Thats about DM4500 but thats surely not the price
in Germany. Here you have to add a considerable NON-US-CUSTOMER penalty.
For a 33MHz 486, 4MB RAM, 106MB harddisk, 14" color monitor, DOS and Win3.1
I have to pay DM3530,00 at a local dealer in my town. I can safely add DM260
for another 4MB RAM and DM212 for OS/2 endig up with DM4011 or $2674.

>What you really proved is this.  Even when the bottom-of-the-line
>Mac II is compared to the top-of-the-line PC, using a benchmark written
>by a PC zealot (hence, undoubtedly, highly optimized for the PC and not
>optimized at all for the Macintosh), the difference in numbe-crunching
>performance is still only a factor of five.  The Quadra, which is at
>least ten times faster than the IIsi, would undoubtedly blow your big
>blue socks off.  (Actually, knowing the lengths that PC zealots will
>go to stack the cards in their favor, I wonder if you even bothered to
>install the floating-point unit in the IIsi.)
>
The FIRTS benchmark I referred to in my    post was a Dhrystone benchmark
compiled with THINK C 4.05 on the Mac IIsi and GCC 2.1 running under OS/2 2.0
on a 33MHz 386 (NOT 486 that will  be another factor 2 to 2.5). The results:

                  Mac IIsi             386
Dhrystones/s      5600                17400

Now you can discuss the meaningfullness or lack thereof of this kind of bench-
mark, but since this test comes from the UNIX (or mainframe ?) world and most
of the machines mentioned in the source code were 680x0 based workstations I
seriously doubt it is highly optimized for the PC. Also it doesn`t include
floating point benchmarks.

As for the Quadra I would like to hear some specs i.e. prices Mbytes MHertzes
and so on.

>>No it just means I can`t afford a mac with the power of my PC.
>
>No, it means that you can't afford a Mac that will run an artificial
>benchmark as fast as a PC for which the benchmark has been optimized.
>This is typical of PC users who mistake performance on some specific
>benchmark with actual computing power.

The SECOND "benchmark" I ran was using Word 4.0 on the Mac and WinWord 1.1 on
the same PC with Win3.0 (not the fastest GUI of all times). The PC was equipped
with a ET3000 VGA board which is definitely not the fastest under the SUN :-)
and in fact already out of production. Both Word versions are functionally
equivalent and --- you might guess it --- the PC won this subjective
"benchmark" hands down. It is _my_ Mac and _my_ PC so why should I be that much
biased ?.

Michael Bode.