Author: George Sobala
Date: 04:38:02 07/09/03
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On July 09, 2003 at 01:06:35, Dann Corbit wrote: > >Their announcement was broadly panned when it came out. > >The computer is a good computer and the chip is a good chip. But their claims >were so wildly overinflated that it got zero praise and plenty O' blasting from >this forum. If they had a milligram of modesty in their annoucements, it would >have gone over a lot better, I think. Who is ever modest about a new product? We shall have to wait until production models are actually available to see the truth, but the "panning" I've seen so far has been (sometimes ignorant, often bigotted) quibbling about the fine-details of the SPEC benchmarks. In real-world applications, all I have seen is that an Apple dual 2GHz G5 blows a (50% more expensive) Dell dual 3GHz Xeon clean off the board. > >At any rate, Apple computers are what they have always been: >1. Excellent for niche applications like video Video: niche yesterday, wider uptake today, tomorrow everyone will want it. >2. Horribly overpriced for both hardware and software (second only to Sun) Certainly true in the last year, when the G4 processors didn't speed-bump to keep up with Intel/AMD, but the G5 looks as though it leap-frogs over Intel on the price/power curve. OS/X is cheaper than Win/XP, and you get some very good apps bundled in for free. >3. Cute to look at. Indeed. I own several computers: Win/98SE, Win/XP, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS/X operating systems, with AMD, Intel and G4 CPUs. The Mac is my all-round favourite, by a long margin. But I grant you that the bottom line is that at present, it really doesn't have much in the way of decent chess software. Crafty, xboard, scid and a slightly broken Deep Sjeng are the only ones that I feel are worth mentioning. Promises of ChessTiger and Ruffian have been just promises for a long time.
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