The MacBook Pro is unquestionably faster than the PowerBook G4 it replaces, but exactly how much depends on how you use it. Apple sells the MacBook Pro as “up to four times the horsepower of the PowerBook G4″ but that’s purely based on the SPECint and SPECfp benchmarks from Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Apple’s benchmarks were compiled using the IBM compiler and a beta version of the Intel compiler for Mac OS.
But SPEC benchmarks don’t tell the whole story. I tested one aspect of the MacBook Pro’s speed that affects me daily and is a better barometer of real world performance: application launch times. I benchmarked the MacBook Pro (2.0GHz) against a PowerBook G4 (1.5GHz) while launching 14 (native and Rosetta) applications and here are the results…
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

The MacBook Pro is unquestionably faster than the PowerBook G4 it replaces, but exactly how much depends on how you use it. Apple sells the MacBook Pro as “up to four times the horsepower of the PowerBook G4″ but that’s purely based on the SPECint and SPECfp benchmarks from Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Apple’s benchmarks were compiled using the IBM compiler and a beta version of the Intel compiler for Mac OS.
But SPEC benchmarks don’t tell the whole story. I tested one aspect of the MacBook Pro’s speed that affects me daily and is a better barometer of real world performance: application launch times. I benchmarked the MacBook Pro (2.0GHz) against a PowerBook G4 (1.5GHz) while launching 14 (native and Rosetta) applications and here are the results…
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.