Not that any of this matters to me anymore, I decided I don’t need a full size PC anymore, so I’m converting and selling my PC in favour of a 13″ Macbook Pro. 7 hours battery? Yes please!

I also recall when they used to claim that the G4 was 2 or 3 times faster than the Pentium 4, then when they switched to the Core 2 Duos, all of a sudden they were 3 times faster than the G4’s - all they do is pay a testing lab to pick and choose the benchmarks that suit their marketing needs.

The Core 2’s were far superior to the Pentium 4. Clock for clock, even the Pentium III beat the shit out of the P4. It was a crappy architecture, where the only thing going for it was ZOMG MEGAHURTZZZZZZZ!!!!!111

The G4 had a lot of nifty tricks up its sleeve, and was great at parallel execution of many instructions at once. However, it sucked at out-of-order execution, and the P4’s ever increasing clockspeeds meant that it soon outpaced everything else on the market, which is why AMD had to invent mythical numbers so people could directly correlate the performance of their chips to the P4, when the P4 was playing the GHz = performance game.

The G5 was an awesome chip, when it hit - but IBM dropped the ball repeatedly. That, and low powered high performance chips just weren’t in IBM or Motorola’s roadmaps. A problem, when over half your user base is mobile and your notebooks are starting to get stale. It wasn’t the performance of the Core 2 that caused Apple to switch to Intel, it was the power consumption. P4’s sucked in that area, too.

Win7 might not be as radical with its changes as the XP -> Vista jump, but to claim it’s the same thing is stretching it a bit far. After all, Windows 98 and Me were basically the same thing under the hood too one could argue, but we all know that wasn’t the case.

Only that Windows Me WAS Windows 98 with 2000’s shell upgrade. It was still a 32-bit protected mode window manager running on top of DOS, they just hid it better and removed the ability to boot into DOS mode. Windows 7 has a few UI niceties to it, and Microsoft seemed to have learnt not to change things around for the sake of change this time around, and there’s performance speedups which is nice to see in a Microsoft OS release for a change, but if you can’t see Windows 7 for what it really is, then I’m surprised you don’t believe this bullshit they pass off as a study in cost-of-ownership.

I have to agree that this “study” is pretty stupid, but don’t think Apple aren’t capable of the same tactics. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Apple-funded studies that make equally silly claims in almost a complete mirror image. I also recall when they used to claim that the G4 was 2 or 3 times faster than the Pentium 4, then when they switched to the Core 2 Duos, all of a sudden they were 3 times faster than the G4’s - all they do is pay a testing lab to pick and choose the benchmarks that suit their marketing needs.

The lesson here is ignore the trolls, and make decisions based on facts, not “studies”.

Also, I have to disagree with you about something:
“Windows 7 is nothing more than a few UI changes, and speedups to Windows Vista. The fact that the version number is 6.1 should clue you in on this. […] This isn’t a new operating system, folks.. it’s Windows Vista Second Edition.”

Sure, most of us may be running the Windows 7 betas on faster hardware than when Vista first came out, but I don’t think that’s the sole reason. Case in point: a friend of mine bought a brand new netbook the other day. HP Mini 1000: 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1Gb RAM, 60gb 5400rpm hard drive. You’d be crazy to put Vista anywhere near that. But we did load up Windows 7, and much to my amazement it was running just as fast as Windows XP - Aero and all, on an integrated 945GM chipset! One of the biggest problems I had with Vista, particularly on laptops, was that it would thrash the hard drive consistently in order to keep its prefetch caches up to date. Disabling the Superfetch service would speed things up a fair bit, but it can drag laptops to a crawl, especially with a 5400rpm or slower disk. Win7’s prefetching seems a lot smarter about when it will and won’t cache things, and it doesn’t seem to get in the way of applications anymore. Little things like that make a big difference as to how responsive the OS appears - and therefore how frustrating it is to use.

Win7 might not be as radical with its changes as the XP -> Vista jump, but to claim it’s the same thing is stretching it a bit far. After all, Windows 98 and Me were basically the same thing under the hood too one could argue, but we all know that wasn’t the case.