Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!agate!garnet.berkeley.edu!knrgroup From: knrgroup@garnet.berkeley.edu (Raymond group) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: Not another NeXT defector???!!! Message-ID: <1990Nov9.002046.17847@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 9 Nov 90 00:20:46 GMT References: <1990Nov8.023952.29943@eng.umd.edu> <1990Nov8.055834.17492@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 25 vd09+@andrew.cmu.edu (Vincent M. Del Vecchio) writes; >We talk about how slow the old NeXTs were because that's the only >thing many of us have to go by. But why should it matter now? You know the new machines are very fast. You know they are faster than any Mac likely to be on the market in the next six months. At any rate, when you do play with a new NeXT, you will be very pleasantly surprised. It is a speed demon. The system software by itself (without the new hardware) speeds up some operations by a factor of two (operations like program loading), and the hardware improves things by a factor of three or four on top of that. As for PostScript, since Post- Script is floating-point intensive, you see'll even greater improvement because the floating point processor on the 040 is about 10 times faster than the old one! >I'd like to see the first Mac 040 accelerators, and compare *them* to the >NeXT At what price? You'd need a Mac IIfx with an 040, 8 MB RAM, and 105 MB hard disk, all at a price of $5000 retail to approach the price/performance ratio for a NeXT. There will be faster Macs, which will be followed by even faster NeXTs, and so on. But until Apple starts pricing its high-end Macs much better, the NeXT will certainly be the better buy.