Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: New Macs

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:1/6/1999; 11:11:10 AM
Topic:How Frontier Changed My Life
Msg #:1857 (In response to 1856)
Prev/Next:1856 / 1858

Another way to approach the design issue is to work backwards from the other direction. Taking the Mac or Windows UI as a given, how would you design a box around it to look in-context with the software running on it? The zig to Apple's zag. If they're going to be the design leader, then someone else could take the contrary view. OTOH, I think Dell et al have been doing a marvelous job of that. The Windows laptops are truly a joy to use. Very easy, light and relatively inexpensive. And a good fit with the software that runs on them. (Not that Mac laptops aren't a good fit, they are.)

One more thought, they aren't designing computers for you and me. If they were, they'd be making nice sounds about SCSI, but they're doing the opposite. And the performance has been mostly a snowjob, in my humble opinion. I had an email exchange with a customer yesterday, saying he was disappointed that we were investing so much in optimizing the Windows version of Frontier over the Mac version. What a disconnect! We have not been doing that. The Windows version of Frontier runs faster because Microsoft has been tuning up the OS to run on current hardware. Apple has not been delivering the performance benefits of the high-clock-rate CPUs they've been shipping. Their benchmarks don't measure the performace of the OS. Sneaky!

Frontier is a really good environment to measure real-world performance differences between platforms. Our page-rendering code is written in totally cross-platform C code, no optimizations for either OS. If we render faster on Windows it's because the underlying OS is not throwing cycles away as much as the other OS is.



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