Low-end Celeron systems out-perform iMac

I feel that I should preface this story with a short note: My earlier iMacopinion pieces generated a lot of mail from the Mac community because of my criticisms of the system. This particular story, however, is not anopinion piece, but is rather based on statistical evidence provided by PCMagazine's technical director, Nick Stam, and PC Labs. One thing that getslost in some of my Apple stories is the admiration I have for the companyand its engineers. One thing you should understand, however, is my loathingof that company's advertisements, which are, of course, more than a littlemisleading. You may have seen a recent iMac ad claiming that the new 233MHz G3-based iMac was "faster than a Pentium II 400."

Not surprisingly, this isn't true.

What is surprising, however, is that PCs based on the low-end Celeron 333actually out-perform the iMac. According to Nick Stam, the ByteMark performance benchmark that Apple quotes is compiler-dependent. When Appleperformed its own tests, it used a compiler that was optimized for the G3 CPU used in the iMac, but used an outdated Intel compiler that wasoptimized for a 486 CPU when it performed the benchmark on a PC. At PC Labs, Stam compiled the exact same benchmark, but this time optimized itfor the Pentium II (P6) line of processors.

The results, shall we say, will not please iMac fans.

Not only did a 400 MHz Pentium II toast the iMac (to use Apple marketingterminology), a lowly 333 MHz Celeron processor performed a full 50% fasterthan the iMac as well. The system tested, incidentally, was a $1400 Delldesktop, with roughly identical specs to an iMac (it was the slowest Dellthey could get). Even the PII 400 was down-graded to make it more closelyresemble the iMac.

The application benchmarks offer the final nail in the coffin.

Stam ran over 30 applications on both systems, including PhotoShop, ClarisWorks, Microsoft Excel, FileMaker Pro, Microsoft Word, and even the game Quake. In over 90% of the tests, the Dell Celeron outperformed the iMac.

And to put the iMac vs. PII 400 issue to rest, the Pentium II 400 doubledthe performance of the iMac when the benchmark was actually tuned for theright chip. So much for that claim.

Remember, however, that the iMac is a low-end machine, Apple's first in years, so one should expect it to perform with the big boys. The only thingconfusing about the whole issue is that Apple would choose to deliberatelymislead the public about the machine. If they had just been honest aboutit, no one would have said a thing.

If you're interested in this information, please check out the PC MagazineWeb site for the full details. They have an iMac First Look article that's worth reading