HubPages: 86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins

86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins
Hal Licino, last updated on March 20, 2011

The Most Outlandish Computer Comparison Ever!

Bloat. If you think that Americans are getting fatter, take one good look at the operating system (OS) your computer is running right now. It gets larger and more weighed down with every update. We are in the third decade of global personal computing, and have we really progressed that far?
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For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable.
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Is this to say that the Mac Plus is a better computer than the AMD? Of course not. The technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities. But the "User Experience" has not changed much in two decades. Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don't even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

h/t What The Daily WTF?

I have no problem believing these results either. Not counting the need for modern HTML rendering and web security standards, there is really nothing I do with computers today that I couldn't do with the hardware and software I was using back in the mid-90's. I would be a bit cramped with a Mac Plus, but I would have no problem with a Mac Quadra 840AV, which I used for a long time until one day the hardware simply refused to power-on anymore.