ON THE NEW PC vs. MAC REALITY

TORTOISE  vs. HARE

Most PC performance tests and reviews by the computer magazines and tech blogs, tend to focus on the bleeding edge computers by vendors, and then measure which one can go the fastest on the most bleeding edge, highest cost configurations.  Kind of like how car magazines focus on super-sports cars and focus on which one can go 0-60 in less than four seconds or can go over 200 mph.  Most mainstream mortals won't be doing any of those things any time soon.

That's why this PC vs. Mac performance review by Popular Mechanics, of all publications, caught my eye.  They go on to review mid-range desktops and laptops by PC vendors like Gateway and Asus, and compare them to equivalent models from Apple.  The whole review is worth reading, especially if you're in the market for a new computer or laptop.

But I'll jump to Verdicts page for now (Spoiler Alert):

"The Verdict, Apple Mac: In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple’s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn’t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X.
In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software—and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

PC: Simply put, Vista proved to be a more sluggish operating system than Leopard. Our PCs installed some software faster, but in general they were slower in our time trials. Plus, both PCs showed weaker performance on third-party benchmarks than the Macs."

So far, so good, along the lines of what one might expect.  But here is the kicker that one might not have expected:

"Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot—and still save $100."

There you have it.  Better and cheaper Windows on a Windows machine can be had on an Apple Mac. 
PC Vendors need to really have a conversation with Microsoft on the performance and pricing of it's products.  The balance of power is shifting.

(Disclosure:  I'm invested in both Microsoft and Apple securities).

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

It is even worse than that. PCs must use anti-virus software, which are notorious CPU hogs. Thus in the real-world, PCs can be dogs and require higher end machines to get acceptable performance.

What would be nice to know is if Macs suffer from performance degradation over time, especially after installing new apps.