LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)

Apples to Oranges?

The Mac G4 vs Pentium III graphics benchmarks as reported on pg. 62 of your March 2001 issue are flawed beyond belief, and should be completely ignored. Two separate issues are at stake here. The first: What are the proper journalistic criteria for a review benchmark? Is it useful or fair to benchmark two things that are profoundly dissimilar? Who cares what configuration the vendors sent you? It is your job to add value by providing the correct context! How could you think that comparing similar configurations--same graphics card, clock rate, etc--would not be the only useful metric?

The second issue concerns product cycles. Once a product or configuration has been made obsolete by the emergence of a new one, shouldn't a review then be withdrawn from publication because the information is stale?

You might see if any of the Mac CPU upgrade vendors can provide you with a dual MP card, qualified by them for the G4 7450; otherwise you will have to wait until the summer to get your hands on a stock Apple dual/quad machine that has the same total MHz as the Intel box, which is much too long to wait to repair the damage done by a review written so many months ago.

In the future, you should have a more rigorous regime for creating and implementing reviews and benchmarks.

David Faibush Ottawa, Canada

Author's Reply