Think Fast. Real Fast. (2/7/98)
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The "Pentium II Snail" commercial seems to have kicked up a bit of a ruckus out here in Macland, as Apple watchers worldwide still recover from the shock of having seen "hard advertising" emerge from Cupertino. (Have you registered your opinion in our survey yet?) But the naysayers cry "foul," taking issue with Apple's claim that "the chip inside every new Power Macintosh G3 is up to twice as fast" as a Pentium II.

Of course, Apple's got a page backing up their claim, showing BYTEmark scores for a 333 MHz PII system from Compaq scoring 51% the speed of a Powermac G3 266, but some people are never satisfied. So it's unfortunate that the Photoshop benchmarks mentioned by Mac the Knife have apparently been buried by Intel, never to be seen again. Apparently Apple ran some Photoshop tests that showed the Powermac G3 leaving Pentium II systems choking in the dust. Some Intel engineers phoned Adobe to take issue with those results; they demanded a rematch, to be done independently of Apple. Adobe obliged.

Guess what? Adobe's results showed the G3 beating the Pentium II by an even larger margin than Apple's tests did. Bet you won't see that fact touted by the shiny dancing bunnymen. However, we hope we will hear those numbers in an upcoming Apple commercial-- perhaps one in the series of which the snail ad is just the beginning. Remember, Apple's trying to retain its core market of content creators now, to whom speed is everything; expect a different kind of campaign later this summer, when Apple expects to go after the long-ignored home market.

 
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The above scene was taken from the 2/7/98 episode:

February 7, 1998: Rumors of a Rhapsody mob-hit have concerned parties searching frantically for the next-generation OS. Meanwhile, Intel's none too pleased about how their Pentium II is slipping in the speed races, no matter how many dancing bunnymen they stick in front of it, and AppleScript may get its second wind at the next Seybold...

Other scenes from that episode:

  • 429: Requiem for Rhapsody? (2/7/98)   Can it be? After Copland got deep-sixed and Apple finally bought out NeXT, we all thought the future of the Mac OS was going to be based on the NEXTSTEP operating system. After all, Apple had paid $400 million of NeXT's technologies, and stated in a press release that "the integration of NEXTSTEP technology in future versions of Mac OS will result in a robust, next generation OS that provides customers and developers with a multimedia-rich and Internet-savvy platform."...

  • 431: AppleScript Comes Alive (2/7/98)   Hands up, who here uses AppleScript? Well, if you don't, you're missing out on one heck of a timesaver. And those of you that do, you might be interested in this Apple article on AppleScript's product manager, Sal Soghoian...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...

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