For years, Macs and PCs have been competing for home users. Apple has recently released the new iMac, and the notebook version of the iMac - the iBook. Even though several years ago, Macs were better than PCs, now, PCs are better than Macs for home users in terms of performance and expansion options. To some consumers, performance is often the most important factor in buying a computer. Performance doesn't necessarily mean how well the computer performs potentially, but only on specific tasks. Both iBook and iMac are designed for home users, most of whom neither care about number of floating-point operations per second, nor know what it means. Very few home users will pay $500 for Photoshop 5.0 to edit photos on their PC. The more likely uses for home computers are: word processing, browsing the Internet, and 3-D gaming. Since the most popular word processor is developed by Microsoft and allegedly optimized for Windows, it would be unfair to compare the Mac version of MS Word with the Windows version. However, comparing the performance in 3-D games and the Internet is fair. Even though PC Magazine specializes in PCs, it reviewed the iBook as soon as it came out. The article focused on performance of the iBook and compared it to a similar IBM-compatible notebook. Since there are no new IBM-compatible notebooks that match iBook's specifications, PC Magazine decided to use the notebook they believed to be closest to iBook - the IBM ThinkPad iSeries 1480. They have very few similarities: the both notebooks are available in different colors, and neither notebook has the fastest processor from its platform. Apple claims that its notebooks are "up to twice as fast as comparable Microsoft Windows-based portables" (qtd. in Hill 53). This statement is very vague - it doesn't say how they compared the portables, and what Apple meant by "comparable". Since similar statements have been made about iMac, speed will be discussed in the next section; for now, let's make sure that PC Magazine selected an appropriate notebook.
