Remember when Apple told us not to believe the MHz myth? It went even as far to make a commercial with a Pentium on a snail. Remember that? So here we are now hearing from Steve that the new iMacs really are faster than the PowerPC version. Huh? What about the myth, Steve?

For years, the megahertz myth debate was a heated one between Apple and PC users. I remember being on the PC side as I was in an environment where both PCs and Macs existed. I saw first hand how even the Intels at the same rating as the PPC Macs ran faster. So why did the Mac community believe this to be true? Because Apple said it was. Sander Sassen at Hardware Analysis documents this well by stating:

Apple claimed “Supercomputer” performance for [its] G4 workstation but all [it] did was break the Gigaflop barrier with a specific application under very specific conditions, upon closer inspection nothing to write home about.

[Nevertheless], the media jumped right on it and Apple sold a lot of G4s just because people thought they bought “Supercomputer” performance at a bargain price. Marketing and the art of presenting a product properly has always been one of Apple’s, or should I say Steve Jobs’ strengths.

Sassen goes on to break down the myth with an Apple specific example. Her expertise in CPU architecture and design shows just how Apple was playing marketing games more than excelling from engineering.

So why the embrace of the foe and no mention of how Apple once teased Intel about its snail pace? Well, it seems Intel itself has stopped making issue about the megahertz clock as well, according to Insight 64’s Nathan Brookwood. Macworld posted an article on the Intel move back in September of last year and while it focused on the low-voltage aspect of the Intel chips, it sprung a one-liner that Macworld left unexplained. “Intel seems to have kicked the megahertz habit,” Brookwood told Macworld. So this may explain why Steve Jobs was able to accept moving to Intel now that even Intel “admitted” that it wasn’t about clock speed anymore.

Whatever the reason for the burying of the Intel-is-slow campaign of yesteryear, print and online documentation will forever allow us to remember that Apple once used to say it was just as fast if not faster than Intel. Now that it’s on Intel and it is saying it’s faster than the PowerPC, one will just have to take it with a grain of salt and understand that it’s all about marketing at the end of the day.

[tags]apple,intel,megahertz,myth,snail[/tags]