Just a quick thought on the relative performance of PowerPC Macs vs. Intel Macs. Recently, I had the opportunity to “acquire” a PowerPC-based iMac 17″ Flat-screen. For those who don’t have Apple’s iMac naming down cold (including yours truly), that is the G4-based iMac with the hemisphere base and the super-cool screen on the swivel arm (picture is available at the prior link). After installing an Airport Extreme card, I had the machine up and running on the home network. I promptly installed Firefox (since I’m not a Safari fan), and voila, I had a good-looking casual web browsing and email terminal functioning. Aesthetically, the machine is great. I especially love how easily the monitor can be moved on the swivel arm. However, I couldn’t help but notice how slow the machine is (it is a 1GHz PowerPC G4 box with 1 GB of memory).

My goodness it’s slow. My wife asked what was wrong with the scroll bar and after a quick look, it was just the machine being really slow. Firefox takes some time to load, as do most other non-Apple applications. The machine isn’t exactly what I would call responsive. My wife’s MacBook is lightening fast in comparison. Applications load instantly and are quite responsive. Even Microsoft Office, which is running under Rosetta (i.e., a PowerPC app running on a translator) is more responsive than Firefox on the iMac.

Apple isn’t kidding when they say their new machines are 5x faster than the previous generation. They just don’t tell you it’s because their old machines were super slow. My Dell Latitude is of the same vintage as the iMac (circa 2003) and is noticeably faster. I can now understand the excitement amongst Mac users regarding the performance of their new machines. But instead of being happy about the performance boost, perhaps they should be angry that Apple had been overcharging them for slower hardware until the switch to Intel. At least now users are getting what they’re paying for with their Mac hardware.