Eye-Opening Speed Tests, Ideal Mac Setup
I’ve been browsing around looking at speed benchmark tests, lately. Why? Because I’m getting an awful lot of calls from folks with older Macs trying to find ways to keep Old Bessie the G4 Tower from doing the final death spiral. I do my best to convince the folks who make a living with their computers to look closely at how much bang they would be getting with the newer Intel Macs nowadays.
This chart is updated each time that a new Mac comes out, and it’s awfully technical for most folks, but I’ll make a few observations:
- The higher the number, the faster the computer appears to be.
- There’s a clear dividing-line between the Intel Macs (at the top of the chart) and the non-Intel Macs down in the slow-boat section, with one exception above the line (the water-cooled Power Mac G5 ‘Late 2005′ Dual Dual-Core PowerPC G5 @ 2.5 GHz) and one exception (the Mac mini ‘Early 2006′ Intel Core Solo @ 1.50 GHz) below the line.
- Why does this matter? Because Apple is shipping two or three generations of computers each year, and the cost/performance/value factors keep changing in our favor. Here are some examples:
- If you had bought the final, fastest G5 tower (the one that is now spewing radiator fluid and self-destructing in increasing numbers), it probably cost you somewhere around $3,299 a little less than two years ago.
Nowadays, you can buy a new 24-inch iMac with better speed, a larger hard drive, more RAM and better graphics for $2,299, and that includes an awesome, 24-inch high-definition screen! In fact, a little less than two years ago, a high-definition screen all by itself would have cost you $1,999, without a computer to hook it to! Nowadays, they can be had for as little as $499.
- With the exception of the Mac Mini and G5 models mentioned above, ANY Intel Mac is faster than any G5, which of course is faster than a G4 or a G3. That means that a currently-available $599 Mac Mini is noticeably faster than your three-year-old G5 tower.
- Apple is selling an enormous amount of laptops, and the ratio of laptops versus desktop computers is rising. This is because there are no more trade-offs that make an old-style tower more desirable, unless you really, really need more hard drives inside (versus outside) your computer. Unless your software is specifically written to use many processors simultaneously, you won’t detect a speck of difference between a quad-processor tower and any current dual-processor laptop. Now that laptops can drive a high-definition display (and those displays are getting so inexpensive), then why not get the best of all possible configurations?
I’m currently advising most folks to get a laptop, with a big, external flat-panel monitor, with extra RAM, and a laptop stand to lift it off of the desk to allow better airflow. That’s what I’m using at this very moment, and I also have an external keyboard and mouse, arranged in front of the big screen. It saves my neck from being torqued in the wrong direction as I type. When I headed out of town for Labor Day weekend (my family’s annual get-together is happening in the San Fernando Valley), I just brought the laptop and left the rest of the hardware behind.
If portability just isn’t important, then those new iMacs are sooooo fine….
