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20050610 Friday June 10, 2005

RE: Why wait for Intel? Norman Richards asks Why wait for Intel?. He argues that you might as well upgrade now if you want a faster Mac. I've had a very personal experience with a new Mac recently and I don't think it's worth the upgrade. My "normal" PowerBook is a 17" 1.33 GHz with 1 GB RAM. The new one I bought is a 17" with 1.67 GHz and 1.5 GB RAM. When I first got the new PowerBook, I did some brief tests against my current benchmarks. To my surprise, the new PowerBook is not faster than the old one. In fact, in some tests it was slower.

Yes, this does seem impossible. I will re-run these tests before I get rid of this new machine, but right now I don't see any reason to upgrade. Posted in Mac OS X at Jun 10 2005, 11:54:25 AM MDT 4 Comments

Comments:

I bought a PowerBook for Java development, and have been just astounded at how dog-slow it is; it's no faster than my 2-yr old IBM ThinkPad X series machine. My PowerBook is the 15" 1.67Ghz with ample memory.

Posted by John on June 11, 2005 at 06:42 PM MDT #

Ahh, the joys of the G4's 166 MHz Front-Side Bus. First generation Athlons and Pentium 4s had faster FSBs than Freescale's present-day G4s. The G4 and its attendant chipsets dissuaded me from buying a PowerBook for Java dev. When Apple releases their dual-core Apple laptops in 2006, I don't know if I'll be able to (or should) resist.

Posted by Jed Cousin on June 12, 2005 at 12:12 AM MDT #

Thanks for the benchmark info. I have th 15-inch, 1.33GHz PowerBook with 2GB memory. I run Oracle, JBoss and Eclipse and Eclipse can be a little slow. The OS benefits far out-weigh any small performance cost.

Posted by Don Shade on June 14, 2005 at 08:55 AM MDT #

Guys...it's nuts to buy a PowerBook simply for developing Java. Why would you? The JDK is always months behind. All the staple diet Java dev tools are platform-independent anyway. Even the big IDEs are platform-independent.

Now, I bought a 12" PowerBook and a Power Mac recently and they are, without doubt, the most usable machines I've ever used - and I've used plenty. But I couldn't have justified buying them purely for reasons of Java development alone.

I'd have stuck with a decent Wintel laptop and used Windows XP or, more likely, Kubuntu.

When all-round usability becomes the prime issue, as it did with me, then justifying a Mac gets much easier.

Posted by Sean Dynan on June 14, 2005 at 09:13 AM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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