MacBookPro

My daughter just got her new MBP 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, it's a beautiful machine. I have a older 17in. 1.50 GHz and a brand new in the box 1.67 that I got from my company after talking them into getting new Macs. We sat side by side last night fooling with our machines, she kept asking me why they say hers is 7 times faster than mine, it clearly isn't, not even close. The older PB opens up programs at a blink of an eye. The same goes for the new MBP. She wanted me to ask when they say 7 times what exactly are they talking about. Do they mean working on projects? She also asked me why anyone would want to install XP, I told her many people use XP at work and it's easier to have both loaded.

From the apple website:

Combined with 4MB L2 cache and a myriad of other engineering leaps, the Intel Core 2 Duo boosts performance up to 39% higher than the previous MacBook Pro and over 7x higher than the fastest PowerBook G4

Click to expand...

Notice the words upto?

Plus, you'll notice in application proformance rather then just opening something up. Also, alot of those are benchmarks rather then real life use. There are certain applications where your PB will be faster (ie running powerpc applications) and there will be times where the PB and MBP will seem neck and neck.

Most of the benchmark tools measure performance of the system at predefined condition and in specific areas of interest. Those rankings/figures have less to do in real life application. A simple example would be XBench tool. You can download it for free and once you run it, it will do some tests and give various performance details (may be you and your daughter could try it too). What I observed in this test is, everytime I run (without changing any environmental variables), it gives a different result. This result alone is a good indicator of the reliability of such benchmark tools. Thay may represent a 'bigger picture' but when it comes to tiny details the results are too vague.

Thanks for the replies. One thing I do notice is the monitor is much brighter and the graphics look better, though they look ok on the PB to.
I don't know if it's in my head but everything seems to look better on the Mac.

I notice that my old pbg4 1.5ghz with 1.5gb ram is faster then my 17inch mbp with 2gb ram.