<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV><DIV>On Aug 24, 2005, at 12:33 AM, Shawn King wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Helvetica">Are you still beating that dead horse even in regards to someone's innocent </FONT><FONT face="Helvetica" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Helvetica">question?</FONT></P> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV>Yep. It's not a dead horse, and that someone asked.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Part of the attraction of running Apple hardware has always been cutting edge hardware technology. Apple was the first to drop floppy drives in favor of optical. Hard disk in a personal computer, USB, Firewire, color displays, and the list goes on and on over the years. Intel's marketing strategy of more Mhz is better has worked and people are still looking for "speed bumps". What happened to elegant system architecture? Engineering? Where did people lose sight of the fact that overall system bandwidth is more important than processor clock, and is after all what gets the work done?</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Apple has already abandon the PowerPC platform. Any updates to their current hardware is nothing but a token effort as they make the transition to a commodity platform - become just another PC manufacturer with no hardware advantages over what you can get from Dell for less money. As I said, I wouldn't expect anything dramatic. They've already passed up at least two golden opportunities for front line introduction of cutting edge PowerPC hardware. Apple used to be first - the 2.0 Ghz G4's and dual core PowerPC 970's I mentioned before are already in upgraded PowerMacs and IBM server hardware - in service in the real world.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>"Speed bump"? What good is a 2.0 GHz processor on Apple's ancient 167 Mhz system bus running PC2700 RAM? That ain't no "speed bump". They've already abandon development of the damn thing, especially when Freescale Semiconductor has dual core processors that are pin for pin compatible with the MPC7447 running on a 667 Mhz bus.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>You got your opinion, I got mine. The difference is that you're a Mac acolyte, I'm not. So I don't mind cutting thru all the marketing BS to get to the real story.</DIV><DIV>--</DIV><DIV>Chris</DIV></BODY></HTML>