Rant about Apple

I love Apple. But they are very much a "Pop" business. The iPods are hip, along with MacBooks etc. So they advertise to idiots a lot. Like the advertisement about the G5 processor being 64-bit. They ran an ad about a waterfall:

4.3 billion. Numbers that big are hard to get your head around, but you could compare 32-bit processing to a glass of water, and 64-bit processing to the Niagara falls. This lets the G5 work with larger numbers in the same clock cycle for video effects, scientific and 3D calculations; the 32-bit Pentium must split such numbers across multiple cycles.

This is clearly directed at idiots. And I know a lot of idiots who would walk up to me and relish in the fact that the G5 processor was like a waterfall compared to my x86 "glass of water." This 64-bit business is comparable to wheels on a car. Apple is claiming that the G5 has 4.3 billion as many wheels as 32-bit processing. Does that make your car go faster? Can your engine even access 4.3 billion wheels? No. It can't. On the benchmarks, is the G5 4.3 billion times faster than the 32-bit PCs? No.

32-bit processing means each piece of memory has an address 32 digits long (in binary). 64-bit means 64-digit-long addresses. With each digit, the amount of memory doubles (you can access 4 numbers with 2 digits: 00, 01, 10, 11. and 8 numbers with 3 digits: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111. 4.3 billion with 32 digits.) Now think about how much memory your computer uses now. 512MB? 1GB? Lets say you are at the max with 4GB. Well with Apple's G5 processor, you can have 4.3 billion times that... a lot.

According to Moore's Law, stuff with computers doubles every 18-24 months. For Apple's sake, lets say its every 18 months (ie 4x every 3 years). That means you will use 8GB of RAM in 2007 (3 years from '04); 32GB in 2013; 128GB in 2019; 1TB in 2025; 4TB in 2031. That's only 1000x the memory in 21 years. 1000 is less than 0.0001% of the 4.3 billion. So your paying for something that you won't use 1/1000th of in 21 years. Don't you think you will have a new computer by then?