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by cmiles74 2890 days ago
Yes, I believe the majority of software and even parts of the OS ran in emulation. Still, even when they moved a lot of that code native, performance wasn't amazing. Someone else mentioned that the rest of the hardware may have been holding these machines back and I could easily believe that.

My opinion: when released, performance didn't meet my expectations and failed to meet my expectations for another five years (when the G3 was released). IMHO, I don't believe the Mac was competitive against the PC until the release of the G4. I could understand why Apple would want to hedge against the PowerPC.
2 comments
bitwize 2890 days ago
That's funny, I too remember things differently. As Mac advocates often, and loudly pointed out, the Mac consistently smoked the PC -- especially at the only benchmark that mattered, Photoshop filters. It was the 90s and RISC architecture really was gonna change everything. At the time, Intel was playing the "megahertz myth" heavily in its marketing, the false belief that more MHz made for a faster CPU, which just wasn't true when comparing across different microarchitectures like Pentium and PowerPC.

And of course, as those from the Lost Amiga Civilization recall, it took about a 500 MHz Windows 9x PC to feel as responsive as a 25 MHz Amiga.

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cmiles74 2890 days ago
It's been a long time, my memory is less a collection of data and more a hazy soup of anecdotes.

I do suspect that Photoshop filters might get some real performance gains out of AltiVec instructions, maybe my boring developer style workloads weren't reaping similar benefits from the availability of those instructions.

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gowld 2890 days ago
What the G4 giveth, Objective-C/Carbon/Cocoa taketh away.
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