DgtizeD

The Apple Mac-Book Pro appears to be a faster machine then it’s corresponding Motorola counterparts given numeric benchmarks. There is however an interesting fallacy involved in some of the qualitative testing being done between old and new Mac’s. This is excluding the interesting fact Apple always claimed that somehow PowerPC chips were faster then Intel chips until the moment they actually put Intel chips into their own machines.

The Ars Technica MacBook Pro article uses a very interesting qualatitive comparison I have seen exhibited elsewhere. That comparison is simply that applications feel faster to load. The fallacy lies in the choice of measuring said speed by the number of “bounces” before an application launches. While I am not a Mac user, my limited experience with them seems to suggest that this is the equivalent of the number of Windows hourglass flips or whatever the equivalent delay indicator in Gnome or KDE is. The interesting thing about using the number of “bounces” as a metric though is the speed of the bounces is probably a variable set somewhere in the operating system. So the easy way to make any application “feel” faster is to slow down the speed of the bounces. Not to say this is all that is occuring, but that is the sort of “feel” tweak that Apple is famous for.