Back in February we reported on the latest report to come from Ingram Laboratories comparing the performance of Pentium systems with the latest 110MHz Power Macintoshes. Details were scarce at the time, but the companies promised the full results early in March. At the end of the month the finished report landed on our desk, bulging with… no details at all. Previous versions of the report offered fascinating insight into the detailed interplay between Mac operating system software, hardware and applications. It did this, quite simply, by listing, for each application, exactly how long it took to perform certain operations, such as scrolling the screen or opening a file. None of that detail is present in the latest report. A quick call to Ingram revealed the usual answer – the results are Apple’s property to do with as it wishes. Apple admitted that detailed performance figures from its Ingram Laboratories benchtest had been withheld at the request of applications developers. Apple said Some of the developers had specifically requested that we didn’t publish the detailed break-down of how their applications performed, adding that since these are companies Apple has to work with closely, it would not have been prudent to have gone against their wishes. Not surprisingly, Apple declined to name the reticent software houses. Ingram tested Microsoft Excel, Word and FoxPro, Claris ClarisWorks, Wolfram Research’s Mathematica, Aldus Freehand, Fractal Design’s Painter, Framemaker from Frame Technology Corp, Deltagraph Professional from DeltaPoint Corp and Vellum 3D from Ashlar Inc. But instead of giving the results for individual applications, as previously, Ingram and Apple merely gave results for categories, thus graphics and publishing applications on a Power Mac performed an average of 84% to 94% faster than on similarly-clocked Pentium boxes, while scientific and engineering applications ran as much as 49% faster. But office applications managed only a measly 9% improvement. Could it be that Apple is protecting Microsoft Corp’s application division from embarrassment? Paranoia fans may enjoy an alternative theory: that Apple is keeping the figures quiet for its own reasons. What if it were shown that a single key Mac publishing or graphics application actually ran substantially faster on the Pentium than on the Power Mac? Apple wouldn’t want that sort of information to get about lest reprographic bureaux dashed out and bought iAPX-86 boxes…
