A couple of our Apple loving friends motivated me to give Apple's OS a test run. I've always thought it looked neat and I'm constantly hearing reports of how stable and user friendly it is. Playing around with it in the store is hardly enough of a trial. I need to use it as I would for regular day to day computing stuff. Knowing that Apple recently switched CPU architectures from PowerPC to Intel I suspected there was a good chance somebody had figured out how to run the thing on standard PC hardware. Google proved useful as always and I began my adventure into running OSX Leopard on the PC I built for myself last December.
It was a little more complicated than just popping a disc in and clicking install. Apples license agreement strictly prohibits installation of its OS on non-Apple hardware and they've gone to great lengths to keep that from happening. It took a few days of tweaking this and that but in the end I managed to get a 100% stable complete installation of the latest version of Leopard running on my PC hardware. After using it for a few weeks I concluded the reports were pretty accurate. It is stable. It is user friendly, and it certainly looks cool. Well, I've kept it installed and I've continued to use it. So, it's with great pleasure that I join the chorus of hip Mac users in singing Apple's praises...well, sort of.
Just to make things a little less, well...illegal?...I went ahead and purchased a retail copy of OSX Leopard. However, I absolutely refuse to buy Apple computer hardware. Here's why. If you go to Apple.com and configure a Mac Pro with specs as close as you can get to the specs of the PC I built you'll end up paying 3.63x more than what I paid for the components in my PC! But wait, it gets better. As if this isn't geeky enough already, let me outline the specs of the machines I have benchmark numbers for.
Brade's Hack Pro
Intel Quad Core (4 CPUs)
8 GB 1000 MHz RAM
768 MB 8800GTX Video Card
$4000 Mac Pro
Intel Quad Core CPU (4 CPUs)
8 GB 800 MHz RAM
512MB 8800GT Video Card
$4449 Mac Pro
Intel Quad Core CPUx2 (8 CPUs)
8 GB 800 MHz RAM
512MB 8800GT Video Card
Using the most popular OSX benchmarking utility my Hack Pro running OSX outperforms the Quad Core Mac Pro by 29%. That's pretty significant for a system that costs 3.63x less. That's not even the most surprising part. I decided to check the benchmark results of the 8 core Mac Pro. I fully expected that a Mac Pro with twice as many CPU cores would completely dominate my 4 core system. Contrary to my belief my system performed only 10% less than Apples 8 core system! What gives?
Everybody knows that Macs cost more than PCs but intuitively you'd think there'd be a good reason for that. I've heard people say that it's the operating system that's justifying the markup but that can't be true since I just bought the operating system and apparently Apple thinks it's only worth $109. My Hack Pro certainly doesn't look as nice as a Mac Pro. However, it's hard for me to believe that somebody buying a $4000 Mac Pro wants it because the case looks neat. Presumably the people buying Mac Pros are workstation users doing a lot of video, photo, CAD, and 3D animation and modeling work. These are people after a pretty high performance margin compared to the consumer level Mac products. Surprisingly, not only would it be cheaper for these people to use "Hack Pros," but they would also net a pretty significant performance boost at the same time. Remember, my quad core scored 29% better than Apple's quad core and cost 3.63x less! That's a problem. I guess the only thing left is service. I've heard that Apple's service is pretty good. Is it worth 3.63x more than what I paid for a higher performing Hack Pro?
Brade's Hack Pro
Intel Quad Core (4 CPUs)
8 GB 1000 MHz RAM
768 MB 8800GTX Video Card
$4000 Mac Pro
Intel Quad Core CPU (4 CPUs)
8 GB 800 MHz RAM
512MB 8800GT Video Card
$4449 Mac Pro
Intel Quad Core CPUx2 (8 CPUs)
8 GB 800 MHz RAM
512MB 8800GT Video Card
Using the most popular OSX benchmarking utility my Hack Pro running OSX outperforms the Quad Core Mac Pro by 29%. That's pretty significant for a system that costs 3.63x less. That's not even the most surprising part. I decided to check the benchmark results of the 8 core Mac Pro. I fully expected that a Mac Pro with twice as many CPU cores would completely dominate my 4 core system. Contrary to my belief my system performed only 10% less than Apples 8 core system! What gives?
Everybody knows that Macs cost more than PCs but intuitively you'd think there'd be a good reason for that. I've heard people say that it's the operating system that's justifying the markup but that can't be true since I just bought the operating system and apparently Apple thinks it's only worth $109. My Hack Pro certainly doesn't look as nice as a Mac Pro. However, it's hard for me to believe that somebody buying a $4000 Mac Pro wants it because the case looks neat. Presumably the people buying Mac Pros are workstation users doing a lot of video, photo, CAD, and 3D animation and modeling work. These are people after a pretty high performance margin compared to the consumer level Mac products. Surprisingly, not only would it be cheaper for these people to use "Hack Pros," but they would also net a pretty significant performance boost at the same time. Remember, my quad core scored 29% better than Apple's quad core and cost 3.63x less! That's a problem. I guess the only thing left is service. I've heard that Apple's service is pretty good. Is it worth 3.63x more than what I paid for a higher performing Hack Pro?
I like Apple's operating system. I like supporting the development of the operating system by paying for it. But, either Apple's going to have to make it more difficult to install their software on non-apple hardware (which, given the nature of their current system might entail an entire re-write of the authentication code) or they might want to consider opening up a little bit. At least for people with no moral compass, such as myself, that don't mind violating End User License Agreements, building your own Hack Pro is not only cheaper but you're likely to simply get a more powerful machine.
No comments:
Post a Comment