Note to Popular Mechanics: Leave the PC reviewing to us professionals

As a veteran IT professional, I often get a kick out of how the mainstream media views technology. Whether it’s some pseudo-custom UI in a Hollywood blockbuster (take “True Lies” and the Arabic Mac-in-Windows, for instance) or a newscaster trying to explain the intricacies of the DOJ/Microsoft antitrust ruling, I can’t help but snicker when I see or hear something that shows just how ignorant the presenter really is.

Case in point: The recent “Ultimate Lab Test” showdown in Popular Mechanics. Why this bastion of insight into experimental flying machines and homemade survival shelters felt the need to comment on the whole Apple vs. PC debate is beyond me. However, I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth — and as biased, uninformed “puff” pieces go, this one’s a doozy!

Some observations:

1. The hardware configurations weren’t identical. In fact, they weren’t even close. In some cases the systems were separated by as much as 2GB of RAM. In others, they weren’t even using the same CPU generation. Clock speeds were all over the map. The whole “methodology” was a joke.

   If there is a Cardinal rule to benchmarking, it’s this: Make sure the systems are similarly, if not identically, configured. This includes things like hard disk rotational speed (never addressed in the PM article); Front Side Bus (FSB) speed (again, ignored by the article); memory speed/latency (another omission); and so on. Just saying the system has “2GB of DDR2” and a “160GB hard disk” doesn’t cut it. Subtle variations in system specification can have a big impact on performance. You need to be precise in your disclosure or the tests are worthless.

2. There was also only minimal disclosure of the software stack. For example, did the Vista systems have Service Pack 1 installed? Also, was it a clean install? Or was the system still full of the 100+ layers of crapware that every PC vendor seems to bundle these days? How about driver revisions? Vendor-specific tweaks or fixes?

   Again, saying it was running Vista is meaningless. Unlike Apple, the Windows universe revolves around a diverse ecosystem of complementary components. When and how these components are integrated, including which drivers are employed and how the overall software stack is constructed, can have major consequences for performance.

3. They’re Mac enthusiasts, and this skewed the coverage. I know, I know, I’m going to get flamed to damnation for this statement. However, if you take a moment to look at the situation from a PC enthusiast’s perspective, you’ll begin to notice the well-defined Apple bias permeating the article.

   For starters, when specifying the PC test bed, they chose form over function. While not unique to Apple enthusiasts, the bias toward good design over raw performance has always been a hallmark of the “enlightened” RDF (Reality Distortion Field) crowd. That any competent PC buyer could assemble a more powerful, capable bundle that would run rings around both test beds — and do so for half the stated price — is lost on them. They looked at their iMacs and saw an all-in-one design. Then they looked at the PC landscape and chose its corollary. Never mind that the system they chose was a piece of crap iMac knock-off designed to woo would-be Macolytes at the local Best Buy. It looked the way they thought a computer should look: Sleek. Refined. Artistic.

   Then there’s the obsession with startup times. Apparently, Mac users spend a lot of time booting their systems (instability?). Regardless, the fact that Vista boots like molasses is irrelevant: Most users don’t power their systems off anymore anyway — they soft-power them into a suspend/hibernation state and resume them when they need to use them again. This focus on startup times shows that the reviewers are out of touch with how the PC world thinks and works, which is not surprising since they’re obviously Mac enthusiasts masquerading as “objective” reviewers. Typical.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter that much to me since no competent system buyer will be taking their cues from Popular Mechanics. All of which leads us to the true audience for the PM article: Mac enthusiasts, a crowd so myopic and delusional that they have nothing better to do than read about how smart they are for buying a Mac in the first place. The folks at Popular Mechanics told us so!