| Wednesday, June 12, 2002 |
13:51 - How to judge speed...
http://www.macnet2.com/index.php?itemid=161
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Another article at NacNETv2 by John Manzione, in which a few good questions are raised: one, whether a computer's "speed" is best measured in large tasks completed per total time, rather than in instantaneous responsiveness or clock speed; and two, why so many people will claw their own eyes out over how much they hate Microsoft-- but will still use Windows.
The first thing I noticed about his Dell was the speed. He was running Windows XP pro and it was wicked fast. Well, let me rephrase that… it appeared wicked fast. Windows (actual windows, not the OS) opened in a split second. Programs launched instantly (except IE), and with his broadband connection, even surfing the net was fast. Now, I know VPC is far from fast, but it was adequate for teaching me how to do things on various Windows operating systems, so I was able to navigate the OS without a problem.
I was impressed, at first. It even looked like the Dell would crush my Dual GHz Tower in just about every benchmark test. Then I started to do some actual work. I launched Office and started typing. Once I had typed a few hundred words I ran the ‘Spell-checker’ and found that spell checking a document wasn’t very fast. It took longer to find the word, suggest an alternative, and then make the change. I did some other things in Office and discovered that the Mac Business Unit really did write a better version for the Mac. The Mac version not only looked better it worked better, and faster. I don’t want to get off the subject, but I just don’t understand how Microsoft could release a product that looks ten times better on the Mac than it does in Windows. Have you ever seen the interface of Office in Windows?
This jives with my experience. I've noted before how Windows is extremely fast, even on fairly crappy hardware-- at least, when it comes to opening windows, moving stuff around, doing basic interface stuff. That kind of functionality has been moved way down deep into the kernel, and so no OS X machine will compare to it if what you base your opinion of a machine's speed on is how fast a menu pops up.
But if the task gets done faster, then that means that the speeds of the two systems are really a lot more comparable-- just that it's very easy to skew one's results one way or the other by tuning your sample set toward what one or the other does better. Want to prove Windows is faster? Get subjective analyses and whatever measurements are possible of how fast the interface works. Want to prove Macs are faster? time an individual task to completion. Different people will appreciate different kinds of speed.
And is the Mac really faster at completing tasks? Well, let me quote this bit first:
For a good 30 minutes, non-stop, I had the following operations going on;
1. Checking and answering email
2. Reading and responding to posts in the MacNET forum
3. Listening to ‘Dirty Vegas’ with iTunes
4. Burning a CD of some of my favorite songs my SUV’s CD Player
5. Organizing a photo album with iPhoto
6. Uploading images to my iTools with iPhoto
7. Downloading an episode of ‘Enterprise’ with Limewire
8. Scanning a QT movie of ‘Roswell’ that I had made.
9. Working on a logo for MacNETv2 (we’ve been told the ‘Aqua-esque’ logo doesn’t do it anymore)
I was doing all this at the same time, with no lag in speed. The PowerBook never choked, never crashed, never over-heated. I kept jumping from one application to another, multitasking like never before.
I didn’t notice I was doing all this until my wife looked over, saw my fingers jumping all over the keyboard, and asked what I was up to. It was then that I realized just how much I had going on at the same time. I was surprised, and impressed with my PowerBook and OS X.
While I doing all this I called by buddy Tim. I gave him a hypothetical to answer; I asked him how he would do all the things I had been doing on his Dell. I didn’t tell him that I was doing it on my PowerBook, only that if he HAD to, how would he do it on his Dell. I asked him this because I really wanted to know if a PC could do it.
He spent a couple of minutes thinking about it, then said he had to think about it some more, and would call me back. I suppose we wanted to try it on his Dell or look through his applications to see if it could be done. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at his house while he was trying to figure it out.
An hour went by and he called me back and told me it “couldn’t” be done. “Not all of it” he said, “Not half of it” he admitted. I then told him about my PowerBook experience. He didn’t believe me. I had to tell him “how” I did it, what software I used, and how much RAM I had installed before he was convinced. His response was “I gotta get me one of those, how much are they again?”
Apocryphal? Maybe. Believable? For me, sure. For others, doubtful. But these are the kinds of tasks we do every day, and none of it sounds alien-- because we have first-hand experience in doing all these things. We know how well each one of these tasks would interact with the other tasks, and we know how much or how little thought is required to do each one. And for Mac users, things like iTunes and iPhoto are such no-brainers that the programs themselves get out of the way and invite you to do other things at the same time. Using software that's less well-designed, you're always thinking about menu options and folders and preferences and filenames. But those things are nowhere to be found in the standard workflow of iTunes or iMovie or iPhoto; with them, it's about the content, not about the programs. When what you're thinking about is music or photos, suddenly everything becomes so much more obvious. It's like the third or fourth year of skiing: up until a certain point, it's labor-intensive, requires all your attention, and is stupefyingly tiring and not at all enjoyable. But as soon as you get to the level where you don't have to think about it anymore, you're not fighting your body, you're not thinking about your feet-- you're just whooshing down the slope with music playing in your mind.
So even assuming that the software to do all these things is available for Tim's Dell, it's going to take him longer to accomplish the list, and he's going to be a lot more tired-out by the time he reaches the end, no matter how fast his menus pop up.
We ended the phone conversation with his rant about how Apple should port OS X so that it would run on his Dell or at least make PC versions of all the ‘i’ apps. He even dared to say that since Microsoft made Mac versions of PC software that Apple should return the favor. Although he is a die-hard PC user, he hates Microsoft. Nevertheless, Microsoft is the brain of every PC out there so I don’t quite understand how a PC user could hate Microsoft.
The entire ‘Apple’ experience is not only about hardware. It’s about hardware and software, the OS and the “i” apps, the yin and the yang of the Mac. Now that Apple has decided to take on Windows head to head I can’t imagine Apple porting anything to the PC.
Exactly. Apple's profitable right now, making software that works with known hardware. It's not in their interest to make free software for Windows users. Why should they? The only possible benefit would be to make Windows users feel less revulsion at the Apple logo. The iPod is already doing that-- it's not designed for Windows, but Windows users are buying it anyway and putting up with the inconveniences of not having iTunes for it. And in some cases, it's convincing them to buy Macs.
But the iPod isn't a computer, and it's not software. If you had a Dell, and Compaq wrote a piece of kickass music-management software, would it convince you to buy a Compaq? No, it would convince you that buying a Compaq isn't necessary because they'll just make the software available for your Dell. The entire crux of the allure of the iApps is that they're Mac-only. What reason would a Windows user have to buy a Mac if iTunes and iMovie and iPhoto were going to be made available for his PC?
To say nothing of OS X. Why would someone buy a Mac if Apple ported OS X to the PC platform? It would mean they'd have to test zillions of new drivers and support an infinite proliferation of new hardware configurations-- and for what? So they could sell a few more copies of the software, at the expense of all those Macs that they would have sold to "switchers"?
As one of the respondents to the article notes, the exchange witnesses the age-old phenomenon of Railing Against Windows: Yes, Microsoft is evil and Windows sucks. But using something else is a suggestion that's so far beyond the pale as to be unthinkable; whether it's Windows or Outlook or IE or whatever, the majority of the world will yell and scream and rant and rave-- but they'll never switch. Because, after all, you know, Macs suck. Everybody knows that.
It's one of the strokes of genius at Redmond: they know to only spend enough money to make the software just good enough to hold and grow market share, but not quite bad enough for people to look for alternatives. That's how they make the profits they do. You want to talk about pragmatic? Microsoft owns the term. And there are some aspects to intense pragmatism that I as a geek, with some ideals of technological right-and-wrong, find appalling.
I must reiterate: I don't want Apple to take over the world. I think that would be bad for everybody. Apple would make a very poor status quo. But they do make an outstanding alternative, and they have perfected the art of playing the minority and the underdog. They make magic. Apple is not perfect, and they make a lot of mistakes. But when one considers their unparalleled software design standards, their oracle-on-the-mount UI guidelines, their idealist approaches toward software development and build tools and hardware integration, and their vision and genius in repeatedly coming up with new things that make a concrete and immediate difference in what people are capable of doing-- they are a great beauty that's derided and sniffed at rather than recognized for its achievements, and the world by and large would rather see them exterminated in the name of standardization and uniformity than to give them the benefit of the doubt. And I think that's wrong.
All I intend by the writing I do here is to convey the way I feel as someone who takes part in this shared hallucination, to plead for a fair and open-minded appraisal of the things they do and create, and to root for the home team. We've all gotta have something to believe in, after all, and Apple has been better than any other object of faith at rewarding me for it.
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