This is pretty unbelievable. HubPages has put together this great “productivity comparison” between the original Mac Plus and a brand new AMD Dual Core machine. The idea being not the overall functionality, but the productivity boost doing the most common office-based tasks (Saving, editing, copy-paste, etc.) and seeing the performance differences between the machines.
Even though the AMD is roughly 1000x faster than the CPU in the Mac, the Mac edges out the AMD 8 out of 9 times in speed executing the most common tasks. Some examples:
The conclusion being that in 21 years there has been absolutely no boost in productivity in computing. When you sit down to work, you are essentially doing all the same things, and those same things, are executing slower than they used to 21 years ago… even though the computer you are on is 21-times faster.
It’s an interesting benchmark. And he’s not trying to suggest that computers haven’t gotten faster all around or cooler… he is just making the point that in our day-to-day lives, the things that computers are suppose to have made SOOO dead-easy by now, are exactly the same. Sort of depressing…
Dugg
http://digg.com/hardware/WOW_Your_1986_Mac_is_more_productive_than_your_AMD_Dual_Core_machine_now/blog