Anyone heard anything else about this?

Barred From the Apple Store

Not sure what to make of it (the performance issues that is)

Thomas

Hilarious.

I'm glad they did end up sending him a test machine - better in his hands than some idiot at marketwatch.com or the like, or even Walt Mossberg. Barefeats is one of the few decent and detailed review sites for serious Mac-users. While it does not engage in the ubiquitous fluff that other 'larger' reviewers do, barefeats' work is far more valuable to people considering purchasing Macs for their performance. And it is far more objective and standardised (thus, more useful to the consumer) than Apple's so-called benchmarks that do not appear to have any solid, publicly available data behind them.

I can understand why they'd be upset though - I ran an Xbench test on an Apple Store on the iMac G5 1.8Ghz and only got a score of 110. Not that great, but I know the conditions (and the machine and the software) were not at optimal operating conditions. I am happier with the 160 Xbenches that have been appearing for these lately, of course keeping in mind that Xbench has its own flaws in conveying a true sense of performance.

Apple's benchmarks are complete with details on how they were obtained, including the machine and software setup. That's pretty far from not having any solid, publicly available data.

What's in contention here is, their test results of a G4 iMac are significantly different to those that BareFeats achieved.

I have to disagree 100% Apples published benchmarks are Crap. Shite does not define them.

I don't care if it's 3 times faster. That tells me sweet fuck all. I want to see frame rates if you're trying to sell me something based on video performance. I want actual data I can draw my own conclusions from. I could not care if they think the new machines are 3 times faster. Without showing me raw data they havn't shown me anything.

At the moment, what gets me is, Barefeats has the full data on Apple's testing, but there is no link on Apple's site to it that I've found so far. So the data must be available, but where?

I don't disagree with what you say the contention is Currawong, but forgive me for a little offtopic editorialising And, like Quamen, I completely disagree with what you say about Apple's 'benchmarks'.

There's no raw or even analysed data here, no numbers deomnstrating the threefold performance. The only way they show this is by a couple of coloured bars - hardly publicly available evidece, and there's nothing here that can be reproduced or compared objectively under external test conditions. And while it's a useful bit of marketing-tripe for consumers to whom the details of the performance advantage are not so important, it says very little of true value to a potential customer who wants to see some solid proof for their claims before they buy.

Having said that, I like a lot of others, bought one regardless of the benchmarks lol

Its probably the case of the benchmarks not really showing any significant jump is performace, but as all us Apple users know, these machine just responde better to all the tasks we throw at them.

I guess those graphs were originally thought of to show would be users what the machine is really capable of. But maybe its a sign that Apple really are not competing with Windows anymore (if they ever did). Not saying they don't. Just jumping to assumption.

Its like the Holden vs Ford bullshit. Holden tried to outdo Ford, for performance factor, Holden wins. But if you talk to Ford about their Falcon, they couldn't give a shit about Holden's many incarnations of the Commodore. And coming from a mechanical point of view, to take out the auto transmission of a Commy, you really have to take alot of other stuff out too. Falcons just fit together and age better. But that's submarining into a topic way off the mark.

At the end of the day, what you say is correct. those graphs and numbers mean shit. I could have photoshoped that up in 10 mins.

Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to paint my G4 case red, to make it go faster....and I will have "graphs" to "prove" it. :P

pipsqeek

Anyone who does take Apples "benchmarks" seriously has lost their minds. When your are buying something like an iMac, who would give a shit if its "3 times" faster than the previous model anyway?