Last week I wrote about the ads where Dell compares its new flat panel machine to the iMac. Here's a commentary from Small Dog (www.smalldog.com) about the similar Gateway ads.
GATEWAY GAFFE Last week I mentioned the Gateway commercial comparing their flat panel machine to the iMac. Aside from the fact that they had to use animation to give their computer move anything close to the degree of motion an iMac has, Gateway apparently also had to fudge their testing to make the claim of speed advantages! Not surprisingly, the Gateway testing said that the iMac was really slow compared to their entry. Well, Jason Wooten at Visual Dynamics (an Apple Specialist) took a closer look at the testing. With the caveat that Jason's testing was informal, here's his report: +---------------+ The report compares a Gateway (iMac rip-off -- you've probably seen the commercial), iMac 700 CD/RW, the high-end Gateway, and the 17-inch iMac. All four were compared in four separate "speed" tests. 1. 3D Video performance, using Quake III demo 2. Java web page loading, using iBench 3.0 3. Boot-up timing 4. Time to load a 2.41M 104 page PDF into Acrobat Reader 5.0 According to the results of the test, strangely enough, the low-end Gateway beat the iMacs in all of the above by far. (Imagine that!) Our experience with the iMacs didn't match up with Gateway's results. Off and testing we went. 1. Quake III Tests What they say: Their testing shows frame rates on the 17-inch iMac around 42 fps, and on the 15-inch iMac around 29 fps, and the Gateways were up around 120-140 fps. What the reality is: etestinglabs, in all of their wisdom, didn't (and still doesn't) understand that Quake III Demo (from 1999) is NOT an OS X product. Therefore, they installed it and ran it in Classic mode under X. Duh. I emailed and confirmed this with them. Even though it was *clearly* pointed out to them that they are running this test in an "emulated" OS, and they acknowledge it, their excuse is "...the tests focuses on the typical home user...who expects the computer to work as-is, out of the box." Of course, which typical home user "out of the box" knows to go to the internet, search for the Quake III Demo (from 1999), download it, install it, and then determine that the frame rates are slow? And then not think to see if there are any updates? You know, if they can download the software, they can probably (in most cases) figure out there is an update. Our testing shows that when you run Q3Demo on a 17-inch booted into OS 9, it cruises at about 80 fps (double what they reported). Additionally, if you install Q3 with the OS X update and check the fps, you are well over 100 consistently. Bottom line: Their tests were bogus. 2. We couldn't duplicate the iBench 3.0 tests because you have to have an iBench server to do the tests. Hmmmm. 3. Boot-Up Time What they say: The Gateway boots from a power-off condition to power on and ready to use in about 27 seconds. The iMac(s) took about 1:20. The reality: After a visit to the Gateway store, we couldn't find ANY Gateway that booted and was ready to use in 27 seconds. The ones we tested averaged around 40 seconds. The iMacs came in at approx 54 seconds -- so the Gateways were faster on this test: However... Bottom line: How often to does a user have to wait for a Mac to boot? Is this even a valid test? We realize that booting a PC occurs more frequently, due to saaaay, crashes / blue screens / illegal operations / installing drivers etc. etc. Does the fact you don't generally have to boot a Mac over and over again come in to play? 4. Load a 2.4M PDF What they say: The Gateways load a 2.4M PDF in about 5 seconds. The iMacs can take as long as 13s on the 15-inch and almost 8s on a 17-inch. The reality: What? Are these guys nuts? Our Mac tests made it really clear. We decided to open a 6M 232 page (Apple LaserWriter service manual) PDF on the iMac 17. It opened in 4 seconds flat. A little longer on the 15-inch. The iMacs smoked the Gateways in opening PDF documents. They should have opened a 20M PDF and seen the difference. iMac = 7s, Gateway, after 2 illegal operations, took 18s (about a minute if you include the illegal operations). Bottom line: The guys probably tested opening the file in Acrobat 5 in Classic. The results they provided on the iMacs were wrong -- way wrong. More info: 1) The new Gateway computers do NOT swivel like the iMac -- they only tilt up and down. 2) The 999 Gateway apparently (according to their site) doesn't include a modem. It's $30 more. 3) The 999 Gateway doesn't include a CD/RW. It's a standard CD drive. Add another $100 for this. 4) There is no Superdrive option on any of the new Gateways. 5) To get your Gateway, add approx $85 in shipping. 6) Gateway doesn't include Quicken (another upgrade). Our tests were informal -- We just took a 15-inch and 17-inch iMac out of a box, updated them to 10.2, installed Quake III Demo, and did the above tests. We matched our "test-bed" to be as close to etestinglabs.com's as possible. -- Lee Larson, Mathematics Department, University of Louisville Phone: 502-852-6826 FAX: 502-852-7132 The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
