Sometimes a bunch of guys and gals just simply whack it out of the park.
Calling it (as always) like I see it, Jason and company compiled a December issue of Macworld that is simply and utterly outstanding. Courageous. Critical. Opinionated. Even outrageous in its "dare to compare" approach. Written in a cool but informative style.
Bravo.

H2U, I think when you see the full article you'll have a better idea of how the tests were conducted and what they mean. The article makes it pretty clear that in most tasks where you had the hottest PC versus the hottest Mac, the PC performed these tasks more rapidly -- page scrolling, Quake frame rates, and MP3 encoding.

In this same issue Glenda Adams, the goddess of Mac game coding says "For games, megahertz are megahertz. It's very difficult to optimize a game -- especially a port of an existing game -- to use the Velocity Engine extensions, which is how you get great performance on Photoshop filters."

I believe the Mac is superior to the PC in a number of ways -- ease of use and integration chief among them -- but when it comes to getting some stuff done quickly (which is what this story was about) the PC clearly had the edge.

Chris

Hopefully, you'll see from the article that the Macworld tests aren't just skewed benchmark tests. Macworld and PC World made side-by-side comparisons of several actually-available maxed-out systems running the same apps. For me, this was a refreshingly honest approach, following years of "Apple Photoshop runs quicker on Macs than on PCs" comparisons that Macs always won. Plus, by declaring the G5 the fastest PC in the world at launch, Apple threw down the gauntlet when it was (inevitably) beaten.

I spent $10K on a G4 733 and 22" Cinema Display a few years ago. I am frankly undergoing a serious inner debate whether to jump ship and plow $6K-7K into a Falcon AMD 64-bit Windows system. The December issue of Macworld provides me with loads of food for thought.

Very good point, Chris.
Not to insult Glenda Adams, but on my G5 I've noticed newer gaves run MUCH better on the system as opposed to older ones. For instance America's Army gets me much better frame rates than Unreal Tournament (original). This is because a) the port of UT to OS X kinda sucked and b) America's Army is a rather new game for the platform. I just think Quake is a bit outdated...

JohnnyA, if you paid $10000 for a G4 PowerMac WITH monitor then you got hosed.
Unless that figure also accounts for a plethora of external devices and a raid array, that was a BAD deal.

My dual2 G5 cost me under $3000 without a monitor -- and that's WITH AppleCare and an internal BlueTooth module.
That figure you posted is SOOO misleading.

And, please, by all means jump ship to x86.
If you truly believe you'll find a better computer in the Wintel world, you're welcome to try. Just don't come crawling back to the Mac 'cause I'm a be there saying "I told you so."

The Mac is what you make of it.

My system also included 3 years of AppleCare and it was, as I recall, the first or second G4 made. Best desktop and LCD around at the time. Best personal computer in existence. To this day, I don't feel ripped off. If you haven't experienced a 22" Cinema Display, you haven't experienced the limits of personal computing.