May 31, 2007
Latest not so great
Some geek decided to put a 1986 Mac Plus up against a brand spanking new dual core AMD box in a productivity challenge. He found, unsurprisingly, that routine tasks take about as long on the Mac Plus as they do on the new PC, with the Mac Plus actually taking less time in 9 of 17 tests.
This shouldn't be particularly surprising. As the article points out, while the AMD does have 250 times as much RAM, 1,000 times as much processing power, and 3,000 times as much storage space, its operating system is 1,500 times larger. Vista is 15,000 times larger. If anything, the bloating of modern code--MacOS 6.0.8 is written in assembly and only takes up 1MB installed--has lead to a decrease in overall functionality in terms of pure computing efficiency. This is to say nothing of Vista which deliberately cripples the user experience.
Then again, the modern PC can do things the Mac Plus could never dream of. Even the Microsoft applications like Word and Excel are much more advanced. Don't believe me? Scare up a copy of Office 1997 and see how it feels. The GUI has been drastically streamlined and Excel is capable of doing a lot more than it was ten years ago. The author didn't even bother trying to surf the web, as there aren't really many browsers that work, and surfing on a 9" black and white screen kind of lacks somehow.
I'd say that the author's conclusion that there has been no increase in productivity is not strictly accurate. There certainly hasn't been an increase in computing efficiency--the opposite of anything--but there has indeed been an increase in productivity as such, as I'm doing far more with my computer than my old Mac SE30 could ever have done.
