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Originally posted by Thoran:
Speach recognition has come a long way... I've got a $40 Sidewinder Game voice for my pc that basically provides user independant voice recognition with no training. I was impressed.

I understand the MAC owners defense of the nameplate... (circle the wagons mentality), but claims of the significant performance advanteges of G4 systems over equally clocked PC systems is debatable.

http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/

This site provides some spec results for equally clocked 1ghz boxes (G4 and P3)... and the results are a wash. Keep in mind that the Intel P4 is slower than the P3 at the same clock speed, design tradeoffs that supposedly opened the P4 up to much higher clock rates than the P3 would have been capable of.

This doesn't run the same test using a 1ghz Athlon (Which is very close to the P3 at the same clock).

This doesn't negate any benchmark where G4's are faster... code/compiler efficiency play a big part as well as OS design, but in terms of straight hardware potential, Athlons XP's at 1500mhz and above, and P4's at 2ghz and above will be significantly faster than anything that Apple has to offer at this point.

Another fairly balanced article, that at least makes an effort towards unbiased testing (although it IS a MAC site)
http://www.lowendmac.com/myturn/01/0910.html

In the end the biggest problem I've got with MAC's is the price. The top of the line performance might be debatable... but the dollars spent per performance increment is certainly not.