7 ms·

> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims That's just laughable, sorry. No one is particularly honest in marketing copy, bu

by ajross 3y ago

> IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims That's just laughable, sorry. No one is particularly honest in marketing copy, but Apple is for sure one of the worst, historically. Even more so when you go back to the PPC days. I still remember Jobs on stage talking about how the G4 was the fasted CPU in the world when I knew damn well that it was half the speed of the P3 on my desk.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Indeed. Have we already forgotten about the RDF?
- coldtea 3y ago
  No, it was just always a meaningless term...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    Was simply a phrase to acknowledge that Jobs was better at giving demos than anyone who ever lived.
dijit 3y ago
You can claim Apple is dishonest for a few reasons. 1) Graphs often are unannotatted. 2) Comparisons are rarely against latest generation products. (their argument for that has been that they do not expect people to upgrade yearly, so its showing the difference of their intended upgrade path). 3) They have conflated performance, for performance per watt. However, when it comes to battery life, performance (for a task) or specification of their components (screens, ability to use external displays up to 6k, port speed etc) there are almost no hidden gotchas and they have tended to be trustworthy. The first wave of M1 announcements were met with similar suspicion as you have shown here; but it was swiftly dispelled once people actually got their hands on them. *EDIT:* Blaming a guy who's been dead for 13 years for something they said 50 years ago, and primarily it seems for internal use is weird. I had to look up the context but it seems it was more about internal motivation in the 70’s than relating to anything today, especially when referring to concrete claims.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Brybry 3y ago
  "This thing is incredible," Jobs said. "It's the first supercomputer on a chip.... We think it's going to set the industry on fire." "The G4 chip is nearly three times faster than the fastest Pentium III" - Steve Jobs (1999) [1] [1] https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/ https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/
  - dijit 3y ago
    Thats cool, but literally last millennium. And again, the guy has been dead for the better part of this millennium. What have they shown of any product currently on the market, especially when backed with any concrete claim, that has been proven untrue- EDIT: After reading your article and this one: https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-just-carefully-select-its-truths/ https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-ju...; it looks like it was true in floating point workloads.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    The G4 was a really good chip if you used photoshop. It took intel awhile to catch up.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mort96 3y ago
Interesting, by what benchmark did you compare the G4 and the P3? I don't have a horse in this race, Jobs lied or bent the truth all the time so it wouldn't surprise me, I'm just curious.
- dblohm7 3y ago
  I remember that Apple used to wave around these SIMD benchmarks showing their PowerPC chips trouncing Intel chips. In the fine print, you'd see that the benchmark was built to use AltiVec on PowerPC, but without MMX or SSE on Intel.
  - 0x457 3y ago
    Ah so the way Intel advertises their chips. Got it.
    - mort96 3y ago
      Yeah, and we rightfully criticize Intel for the same and we distrust their benchmarks
mc32 3y ago
Didn’t he have to use two PPC procs to get the equivalent perf you’d get on a P3? Just add them up, it’s the same number of Hertz! But Steve that’s two procs vs one! I think this is when Adobe was optimizing for Windows/intel and was single threaded, but Steve put out some graphs showing better perf on the Mac.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
leptons 3y ago
Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk", but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age. Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's, but that was their marketing angle from the 1990's.
- galad87 3y ago
  From https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/ https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/: the ad was based on the fact that Apple was forbidden to export the G4 to many countries due to its “supercomputer” classification by the US government.
  - m000 3y ago
    It seems that US government was buying too much into tech hypes at the turn of the millenium. Around the same period PS2 exports were also restricted [1]. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      The PS2 was used in supercomputing clusters.
- georgespencer 3y ago
  > Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk" It's certainly fair to say that twenty years ago Apple was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first supercomputer on a chip"[^1]. > but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age. That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, fucking obviously? The entire reason they made the claim is precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very often.) The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow technical definition of a supercomputer. You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine’s Aeneas Project, which in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance. This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various subsets of super computers, for context. This narrow definition is also why the machine could not be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned into.[^3] > Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz processor!). The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance, which is a billion floating point operations per second. Are you perhaps thinking of a different decade? [^1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple.com/powermac/processor.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple.... [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/media/File:Supercomputers-history.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/med... [^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/17/g4.ban.idg/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.c... [^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance
brokencode 3y ago
Have any examples from the past decade? Especially in the context of how exaggerated the claims are from PC and Android brands they are competing with?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lynndotpy 3y ago
  Apple recently claimed that RAM in their Macbooks is equivalent to 2x the RAM in any other machine, in defense of the 8GB starting point. In my experience, I can confirm that this is just not true. The secret is heavy reliance on swap. It's still the case that 1GB = 1GB.
  - dmitrygr 3y ago
    > The secret is heavy reliance on swap You are entirely (100%) wrong, but, sadly, NDA...
    - ethanwillis 3y ago
      How convenient :)
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - monsieurbanana 3y ago
      Regardless of what you can't tell, he's absolutely right regarding Apple's claims: saying that a 8gb mac is as good as a 16gb non-mac is laughable.
      - dmitrygr 3y ago
        That was never said. They said 8gb mac is similar to a 16gb non-Mac
windowsrookie 3y ago
While certainly misleading, there were situations where the G4 was incredibly fast for the time. I remember being able to edit Video in iMove on a 12" G4 Laptop. At that time there was no equivalent x86 machine.
jmull 3y ago
If you have to go back 20+ years for an example…
n9 3y ago
Worked in an engineering lab at the time of the G4 introduction and I can contest that the G4 was a very, very fast CPU for scientific workloads. Confirmed here: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and elsewhere.) A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench. Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.
- ajross 3y ago
  It's just amazing that this kind of nonsense persists. There were no significant benchmarks, "scientific" or otherwise, at the time or since showing that kind of behavior. The G4 was a dud. Apple rushed out some apples/oranges comparisons at launch (the one you link appears to be the bit where they compared a SIMD-optimized tool on PPC to generic compiled C on x86, though I'm too lazy to try to dig out the specifics from stale links), and the reality distortion field did the rest.
- seec 3y ago
  Funny you mention that machine I still have one of those laying around. It was a very cool machine indeed with a very capable graphics card but that's about it. It did some things better/faster than a Pentium III PC but only if you went for the bottom of the barrel unit and crippled the software support (MMX just like another reply mentioned). On top of that Intel increased frequency faster than Apple could handle. And after the release of the Pentium 4, the G4s became very noncompetitive so fast that one would question what could save Apple (later, down the road, Intel it turns out). They tried to salvage it with the G5s but those came with so many issues that even their bi-proc water-cooled were just not keeping up. I briefly owned of those after repairing it for "free" using 3 of them, supposedly dead; the only thing worth a dam in that was the GPU. Extremely good hardware in many ways but also very weak for so many things that it had to be used only for very specific tasks, otherwise a cheap Intel PC was much better. Which is precisely why right after they went with Intel. After years of subpar performance on laptops because they were stuck at G4 (not even high frequency). Now I know from your other comments that you are a very strong believer and I'll admit that there were many reasons to use a Mac (software related) but please stop pretending they were performance competitive because that's just bonkers. If they were, the Intel switch would never have happend in the first place...

by ajross 3y ago

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

Indeed. Have we already forgotten about the RDF?

coldtea 3y ago
No, it was just always a meaningless term...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jimbokun 3y ago
  Was simply a phrase to acknowledge that Jobs was better at giving demos than anyone who ever lived.

dijit 3y ago

You can claim Apple is dishonest for a few reasons. 1) Graphs often are unannotatted. 2) Comparisons are rarely against latest generation products. (their argument for that has been that they do not expect people to upgrade yearly, so its showing the difference of their intended upgrade path). 3) They have conflated performance, for performance per watt. However, when it comes to battery life, performance (for a task) or specification of their components (screens, ability to use external displays up to 6k, port speed etc) there are almost no hidden gotchas and they have tended to be trustworthy. The first wave of M1 announcements were met with similar suspicion as you have shown here; but it was swiftly dispelled once people actually got their hands on them. *EDIT:* Blaming a guy who's been dead for 13 years for something they said 50 years ago, and primarily it seems for internal use is weird. I had to look up the context but it seems it was more about internal motivation in the 70’s than relating to anything today, especially when referring to concrete claims.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Brybry 3y ago
"This thing is incredible," Jobs said. "It's the first supercomputer on a chip.... We think it's going to set the industry on fire." "The G4 chip is nearly three times faster than the fastest Pentium III" - Steve Jobs (1999) [1] [1] https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/ https://www.wired.com/1999/08/lavish-debut-for-apples-g4/
- dijit 3y ago
  Thats cool, but literally last millennium. And again, the guy has been dead for the better part of this millennium. What have they shown of any product currently on the market, especially when backed with any concrete claim, that has been proven untrue- EDIT: After reading your article and this one: https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-just-carefully-select-its-truths/ https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-ju...; it looks like it was true in floating point workloads.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  The G4 was a really good chip if you used photoshop. It took intel awhile to catch up.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mort96 3y ago

Interesting, by what benchmark did you compare the G4 and the P3? I don't have a horse in this race, Jobs lied or bent the truth all the time so it wouldn't surprise me, I'm just curious.

dblohm7 3y ago
I remember that Apple used to wave around these SIMD benchmarks showing their PowerPC chips trouncing Intel chips. In the fine print, you'd see that the benchmark was built to use AltiVec on PowerPC, but without MMX or SSE on Intel.
- 0x457 3y ago
  Ah so the way Intel advertises their chips. Got it.
  - mort96 3y ago
    Yeah, and we rightfully criticize Intel for the same and we distrust their benchmarks

mc32 3y ago

Didn’t he have to use two PPC procs to get the equivalent perf you’d get on a P3? Just add them up, it’s the same number of Hertz! But Steve that’s two procs vs one! I think this is when Adobe was optimizing for Windows/intel and was single threaded, but Steve put out some graphs showing better perf on the Mac.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

leptons 3y ago

Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk", but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age. Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's, but that was their marketing angle from the 1990's.

galad87 3y ago
From https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/ https://512pixels.net/2013/07/power-mac-g4/: the ad was based on the fact that Apple was forbidden to export the G4 to many countries due to its “supercomputer” classification by the US government.
- m000 3y ago
  It seems that US government was buying too much into tech hypes at the turn of the millenium. Around the same period PS2 exports were also restricted [1]. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    The PS2 was used in supercomputing clusters.
georgespencer 3y ago
> Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk" It's certainly fair to say that twenty years ago Apple was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first supercomputer on a chip"[^1]. > but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age. That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, fucking obviously? The entire reason they made the claim is precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very often.) The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow technical definition of a supercomputer. You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine’s Aeneas Project, which in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance. This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various subsets of super computers, for context. This narrow definition is also why the machine could not be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned into.[^3] > Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz processor!). The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance, which is a billion floating point operations per second. Are you perhaps thinking of a different decade? [^1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple.com/powermac/processor.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000510163142/http://www.apple.... [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/media/File:Supercomputers-history.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#/med... [^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/17/g4.ban.idg/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020418022430/https://www.cnn.c... [^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#Performance

brokencode 3y ago

Have any examples from the past decade? Especially in the context of how exaggerated the claims are from PC and Android brands they are competing with?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lynndotpy 3y ago
Apple recently claimed that RAM in their Macbooks is equivalent to 2x the RAM in any other machine, in defense of the 8GB starting point. In my experience, I can confirm that this is just not true. The secret is heavy reliance on swap. It's still the case that 1GB = 1GB.
- dmitrygr 3y ago
  > The secret is heavy reliance on swap You are entirely (100%) wrong, but, sadly, NDA...
  - ethanwillis 3y ago
    How convenient :)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - monsieurbanana 3y ago
    Regardless of what you can't tell, he's absolutely right regarding Apple's claims: saying that a 8gb mac is as good as a 16gb non-mac is laughable.
    - dmitrygr 3y ago
      That was never said. They said 8gb mac is similar to a 16gb non-Mac

windowsrookie 3y ago

While certainly misleading, there were situations where the G4 was incredibly fast for the time. I remember being able to edit Video in iMove on a 12" G4 Laptop. At that time there was no equivalent x86 machine.

jmull 3y ago

If you have to go back 20+ years for an example…

n9 3y ago

Worked in an engineering lab at the time of the G4 introduction and I can contest that the G4 was a very, very fast CPU for scientific workloads. Confirmed here: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and elsewhere.) A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench. Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.

ajross 3y ago
It's just amazing that this kind of nonsense persists. There were no significant benchmarks, "scientific" or otherwise, at the time or since showing that kind of behavior. The G4 was a dud. Apple rushed out some apples/oranges comparisons at launch (the one you link appears to be the bit where they compared a SIMD-optimized tool on PPC to generic compiled C on x86, though I'm too lazy to try to dig out the specifics from stale links), and the reality distortion field did the rest.
seec 3y ago
Funny you mention that machine I still have one of those laying around. It was a very cool machine indeed with a very capable graphics card but that's about it. It did some things better/faster than a Pentium III PC but only if you went for the bottom of the barrel unit and crippled the software support (MMX just like another reply mentioned). On top of that Intel increased frequency faster than Apple could handle. And after the release of the Pentium 4, the G4s became very noncompetitive so fast that one would question what could save Apple (later, down the road, Intel it turns out). They tried to salvage it with the G5s but those came with so many issues that even their bi-proc water-cooled were just not keeping up. I briefly owned of those after repairing it for "free" using 3 of them, supposedly dead; the only thing worth a dam in that was the GPU. Extremely good hardware in many ways but also very weak for so many things that it had to be used only for very specific tasks, otherwise a cheap Intel PC was much better. Which is precisely why right after they went with Intel. After years of subpar performance on laptops because they were stuck at G4 (not even high frequency). Now I know from your other comments that you are a very strong believer and I'll admit that there were many reasons to use a Mac (software related) but please stop pretending they were performance competitive because that's just bonkers. If they were, the Intel switch would never have happend in the first place...