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Gentle HP 3000 List Members,

Over the last several months, we have been bombarded by statements, in the
form of ads, promotions and write-ups from so-called experts, all dealing
with how fast the Apple platform is.  We have seen statements to the effect
the iMac runs faster than a 400 MHz Pentium II, and other statements the
Apple PowerBook G3 is faster than any PC.

These statements always got my attention.  I wanted to look at the backup
data, how and what was being tested.  Two things stood out, first it was
difficult to get any information and seconds, when I could find out what
was being tested, it invariably was programs that did Image processing.

I have for the past 3+ years or more, on this list and others, asked the
Mac aficionados to explain to me why I should even consider using a Mac for
my work.  I never got an answer to that.  Recently, I discovered why.

Before I get into this, let me just explain how I use my laptop computer.
 My notebook is my desktop replacement, it is the only system I use,
whether on the road, at the office or at home.  I use my notebook for
e-mail, web access, word processing (I write a lot of documentation both in
Word and FrontPage,) spreadsheet for financial data or performance
analysis.  I use Reflection to access my development HP 3000, and I also do
Visual Basic programming on my notebook.

At the office, I usually have 2 rows on the taskbar, because I have so many
windows in use simultaneously.  The notebook is only a 166 MHz MMX box, but
it seems to be quite sufficient for me.  I do run Windows NT 4.0 SP3, and I
have 64MB of RAM.  The 4GB disk drive is only about half full.  The
notebook resides in a docking station when I am in the office, thus
connecting it to the rest of the network.  This way I can use one of
several printers, access network files, and of course, backup my laptop to
our autoloaders.

The notebook with Windows NT has never, ever crashed or hung up.  I reboot
only when there is a change of hardware, because NT 4.0 is not plug and
play.  So if I have a dock change, or if I need to use PC-cards, a reboot
is in order.  If I was going to be persuaded to change, it would have to be
for very compelling reasons.  Performance improvements would have to be
dramatic.  The iMac was cheap, very cheap and promised dramatic
improvements.  The PowerBook is being marketed as faster than any PC,
laptop or desktop.  Was it time to seriously consider a change?

On the flight to San Francisco this past Monday morning, I am reading a
magazine which deals exclusively with mobile computing (Mobile Computing &
Communications, September 1998).  It has reviews of Apple products
alongside Wintel products.  They wrote a glowing review of the Mac
PowerBook G3, which further got my attention.  In the same article they do
performance review on page 30.  This review poses the same questions I have
been asking.  They mention the Apple claims dealing with imaging products,
and their tests seem to bear this out.  Next, they start discussing how the
same tasks could be compared between Apple and Wintel, by virtue of the
fact the Microsoft Office suite exists on both systems and the files and
scripts can be used on both.  They decided to test it.  The article
mentions what the test suite does, (a Word macro creating a 50,000 word
document, formatting text and inserting bitmaps, tables and Excel charts)

They compared a $2,579 PB G3 233MHz to a $1,400 Toshiba 233MHz Pentium (not
a Pentium II).  On the Toshiba, the test took 8.8 minutes, on the Mac the
same test took 47.2 minutes.  Wow!

At the Comdex Enterprise show, I picked up a copy of this week's PC Week.
 I turned to Louderback's column and lo and behold, it's about benchmarks.
 This time reports on tests PC Week's labs have performed on the iMac.
 Apple claims the iMac will run faster and a Pentium II 400MHz.  Come to
find out, the iMac got its little clock cleaned when a Celeron 333MHz,
costing virtually the same amount of money, outperformed it by 50%.  They
ran a suite of 30+ application benchmarks including Quake, Photoshop,
Claris Works and Excel.  The Celeron-based machine beat the iMac more than
90% of the time.  Louderback then invites you to see the details of the
report at the PC-Week web site.  I visited the web site and saw the
details.

Double wow!!

Needless to say, I am no longer considering an iMac or a PowerBook.  To
think I might have fallen pray to misleading advertising, I am so ashamed.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP America, Inc.
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com