[madmanXwater]

Ok, well maybe I've been wrong. Anyone who has read any of my posts for the last two months have heard me "complaining" about the lack of power in the current PowerBooks compared to the Intel/AMD world. I've been trying to convince people about the performance/value problem that I saw with the PowerBooks specs and prices compared to my new HP zd8225ca WinTel laptop and many others like it on the market. This weekend’s events have convinced me that my claims have been very misguided.

I had to bring a lot of work home this weekend that had to be completed by 8:30 Monday for a very important client meeting. It involved many different tasks. Editing a high-impact video, rendering and recompressing fourteen different other videos, editing and mixing an audio piece, and developing a presentation with animation, audio and slides. The real kicker is that I couldn’t do this at my house on my desktop, because of some personal matters I needed to be out of town with family. This meant I only had access to my laptops. I decided to bring both my 17” PowerBook 1.33 G4 with 2Gig Ram and my HP zd8225ca 3.2 P4 with 1Gig Ram, even though I’ve been using the HP 99% of the time for the last two months. Thank goodness I decided to bring the PowerBook, because in all honesty, it saved my bacon!!

I learned a very valuable lesson, one that I want to pass on to anyone who is either considering buying a PowerBook or is not happy with Apple’s current lineup and is considering going to a WinTel laptop. The lesson? There is a huge difference between specs on a page and productivity or workflow in the real world!

The PowerBook’s secret weapon is OS X and the consistency and flow with which the whole system allows you to keep working and creating without being interrupted. The PowerBook allowed me to keep editing video in Final Cut Pro while rendering other videos in the background, downloading files I needed and keeping in touch with email and FTPing files over Airport. Loading files from DVDs, CDs, and swapping firewire and USB external hard drives all with the CPU at close to 100%. The PowerBook performed perfectly, it has been on for three days straight, without a reboot, and without loosing it’s connection to the Internet and completing a huge workload all while constantly switching between multiple apps and providing instant access to everything!

The HP started to fall apart almost right away. After rendering only a few files, the system became sluggish with screen redraws and switching between apps becoming very slow, with lots of swap time from the hard drive. Editing video while rendering in the background was impossible and the wireless connection to the Internet kept dropping forcing a reboot. After only a few hours of this I decided to move back to the PowerBook, and what a boost that was! Even though the HP has a faster CPU, bus, memory and every other component, the big advantage to workflow on the PowerBook is how OS X handles memory and how it distributes CPU power. I never felt any hit in the app I was working in, it “just felt right”! No waiting for the OS to keep up or redraw, and no rebooting for any reason. I know my PowerBook has more Ram, but I’m convinced that was not the key difference.

The bottom line: I’m all pumped about using the PowerBook again! Even though they don’t have the specs of current WinTel laptops, the true value of the PowerBook is in its functionality and ability empower you to be creative and productive without getting in your way.

I’m still very much looking forward to the Intel PowerBooks to get more CPU power and better battery life, but I’m convinced that today’s PowerBooks offer a great product and wonderful user experience for the mobile user.

Mike
Canada

[irockdabari]

We're glad that you are now able to see the entire spectrum of Apple's light. :-)

[mduell]

You said it yourself, the HP was swapping and the PowerBook isn't. The creates a huge difference in performance and responsiveness.

I consider myself a poweruser, and I'm a student with deadlines a plenty, so I stuff all my computers with as much RAM as they can hold. Like you I need to be able to transcode a video, while rendering a model, while working on another model with email/AIM going on in the background and often recording TV too because I can never watch shows when they're being broadcast.

[Al G]

Originally Posted by madmanXwater

The PowerBook’s secret weapon is OS X and the consistency and flow...

I have been saying this for a while now. There's no question that the G4 in a Powerbook can't come close to the raw computing power of a P4, Pentium M or Athlon. But outside of pure number crunching with a single application, I think OS X just feels faster and smoother than XP.

I can't wait to see OS X running on a dual-core Yonah or Merom.

[crouchingtiger]

ummm, mduell had it right -- you weren't seeing so much the difference between OS X and XP so much as the difference between 2 GB of RAM and 1 GB of RAM.

Not to say that OS X isn't the superior operating system, but this is hardly the definitive example...

[madmanXwater]

I understand that the difference between 1GB Ram on the HP and 2Gb on the PowerBook can and should make a huge difference, however. The point that interests me, is that when all of this work was going on, the HP still showed 500+ MB of free ram. Why would there be so much swap activity when there is still tons of ram left? One of the biggest things to me was that switching between apps was instant on the PowerBook, and XP seemed to "forget" about an app that was open but had not been used for a little while. It would take forever for the screen to draw and menus and buttons to become usable. OS X never did this, even though the CPU was taxed and lots of drive access was going on with the rendering, apps felt like nothing was going on.

Am I wrong on this? Or is OS X much better at distributing the workload and providing the user with instant response?