As the Apple Turns: Scene 4808: Feed The Need For Speed (7/9/04)

Feed The Need For Speed (7/9/04)

What do you mean you're already starting to get bored with Tiger? The Tigeriffic Stevenote wasn't even two weeks ago, the operating system won't ship for at least six months (and possibly up to a year from now), all the hands-on reports are based solely on an early developer release, and you're bored? How can you... What could possibly... Ooo. Seriously, you'd need to be a four-year-old on Pixie Stix and coffee grounds to have an attention span that short. For crying out loud, people, read a book once in a while or something, or pretty soon you won't even be able to sit still for anything longer than a Pepsi commercial.

Okay, fine, we admit it: we're starting to get bored with the whole Tiger thing, too.

And yes, we also get distracted by shiny objects, we feel that the 30-second commercial is the ideal format for any narrative worth absorbing, and the last time we read anything longer than the ingredients list on a bag of Baked Lays was when we skimmed the fine print on a tube of Krazy Glue to find out how to get our hands unstuck from the side of a Coke machine. (Don't ask.) Happy?

So, yeah, we have to agree that there's only so much in-depth discussion of Dashboard and Spotlight we can stand before we have to go bat a sparkly ball of tin foil around on the kitchen floor for ten or fifteen minutes to loosen back up. Thankfully, though, someone has finally posted some new information on the Tiger developer release, and it's all about speed: Geek Patrol has Xbench scores in various categories as measured in Jaguar, Panther, and pre-release Tiger, all performed on the same 1.6 GHz Power Mac G5, so you can get a sense of how Tiger compares speedwise to what you're using now.

Aaaaand we can see that you're already reaching for the remote, so we'll just get to the goods, shall we? Generally speaking, the results are promising; in all but one category-- the user interface-- Tiger performed as well as or marginally better than Panther did, which, in turn, usually ran faster than Jaguar. And the fact that Tiger's UI score is only 95% that of Panther's is hardly reason to beat yourself about the head and shoulders while emitting low moans, since Tiger is still very pre-release with lots of debugging code, and Apple has plenty of time to optimize the bejeezus out of the thing once it has the feature set locked down and a bit more of the code fleshed out. (Then again, we suppose they have equally as much time to shovel in the bloat and slow the thing down to a crawl, but for the most part, that seems to be more of a Redmond dance move than how the players boogie down in Cupertino.)

We've got a one-hand/other-hand thing to consider, however. On the one hand, these tests were all run on a low-end G5, and we know that Tiger is supposed to be tweaked heavily for maximum G5 efficiency, so the performance gains vs. Panther might not quite match up on your G3 and G4 systems. On the other hand, the G5 in question was a single-processor model, so if you've got a dual-processor G4, your "Look Ma, Two Chips" status might lead to bigger boosts than having a single G5 might give you. Mind you, this is all wild and baseless speculation on our part, but it's the only way we're going to stay interested long enough to finish this scene without getting distra Hey, what's that shiny thing over th

SceneLink (4808)

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The above scene was taken from the 7/9/04 episode:

July 9, 2004: "NDA? What NDA?" Someone posts Tiger speed benchmarks, and so far they look pretty promising. Meanwhile, a couple of guys get banned from the iTunes Music Store 100 Million Song Countdown giveaway, and the Windows tech press actually calls Microsoft the "B" word (no, not that "B" word)...

Other scenes from that episode:

4809: Always Read The Fine Print (7/9/04) So have you blown an obscene amount of credit on songs at the iTunes Music Store over the past week, desperately trying to score a free 20 GB iPod by purchasing at just the right time? And now you've got a whole Purchased Music playlist packed full of songs you don't even want because you were trying to maximize your chances for success?...
4810: They Said The "B" Word! (7/9/04) Yes, we're well aware that it's Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, but even though this was technically a short week, it was definitely also one of the longest short weeks of our lives. Since we'd desperately like to close the books on this mutant time-dilated week from the Scary Hot Place, we're going to keep this as short and sweet as we possibly can (which probably isn't saying much)...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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