Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Monday, September 2, 2002
23:58 - Any exposure is good exposure http://www.gateway.com/products/desktops/prf4/sweepstakes/allmedia.shtml	(top)
Apparently there's a new ad out for the Gateway Profile 4, the machine that's specifically designed to compete with the flat-panel iMac-- and apparently the first that actually acknowledges this. Whereas the eMachines iMac lookalike back in 1999 went through its short and lawsuit-laden life insisting to its last dying breath that it was not in any way intended to resemble the iMac-- why, it had a floppy drive! How could anyone confuse the two?-- the Profile 4 appears to be going directly after the iMac, right up to and including performance-comparison spec sheets on their website and TV ads directly attacking the iMac. The ad, I'm told (though I'm apparently watching all the wrong channels), even features the Profile 4 sticking its "tongue" out at the iMac, the way the iMac did in its own ad back in January. I'm entirely happy about this. No, really, I am. Apple has had to spend its whole lifetime running ads which try to convince the computer buying market that Macs bring something to the table that the standard default PC doesn't. Apple ads have always had to revolve around either a comparison to a PC, or a lifestyle portrayal of a Mac as being an "alternative" platform. PC makers have never been under any pressure to do the reverse. Not since the 80s. If Gateway is having to run a full-court press against the iMac, it can only be because they're feeling market pressure to do so. Why waste marketing dollars responding to something that's not even a threat? So I think this campaign will only serve to increase Apple's legitimacy in consumers' eyes. It gets the Apple name out into the open. And the fact that the iMac is presented as the loser in the competition is immaterial compared to the fact that the Apple name is being mentioned in the first place-- to say nothing of the fact that it's being mentioned by someone other than Apple. The MSN ads that claim it to be "a great alternative to AOL" do AOL every bit as much a favor as a disservice purely by mentioning its name, letting it filter into people's minds subconsciously as they eat dinner. As for the comparisons-- it's hardly surprising that the Profile 4 comes out on top in the tests they run. The Quake fps scores are pretty woeful, as is the boot-time comparison. JavaScript is certainly going to be a lot better on any Windows machine, because IE is nowhere near as optimized on the Mac as it is on its native platform (where it's all but an embedded kernel process). The numbers overall are so vastly different that I can't help concluding that if an independent third party were to conduct these tests without being commissioned by either party, they'd find results that prove both companies exaggerate their results to an insane level. But there are things Gateway could have chosen to test that wouldn't have resulted in anywhere near as big a disparity. I'm not going to claim the infamous Photoshop filter test suite is a great example of an unbiased benchmark, but given its reliance on vector operations, the G4 is bound to have a better edge. Same with things like Media Cleaner performance, or MPEG-2 compression. Which brings me to another interesting point. Has nobody noticed what the Profile 4 lacks? Namely, hard drive space... and DVD capabilities? Neither Profile 4 model comes with a DVD drive-- not just not a burner, but not a player. And the Profile 4 models on the Gateway site come with 20GB and 40GB drives (though the top-end test mule seemed to have a 120GB drive for some reason), whereas the iMac can be outfitted up to 80GB-- 40 is the bottom end. To say nothing of things like the wide screen on the 17" iMac, the fact that the neck swivels as well as tilts up and down, and the fact that it runs OS X and comes with all the iApps, as opposed to the Profile 4 which comes with Microsoft Works and The Sims. In any case, yeah-- comparisons will be comparisons, and it doesn't bother me that this one comes up spades for the iMac. Because the big win is that Apple flushed Gateway out into the open on this one-- they're no longer pretending not to be taking all their cues from Apple. They're being honest about it. And people recognize which is the pioneer and which is the imitator. They really do.