Primate Labs Blog

I’m excited! Apple’s updated the Mac Pro (and the Xserve) to use Intel’s new quad-core Xeon processors. The updated Mac Pro default configuration now comes with two quad-core Xeons (for eight cores total) for $2799. That’s an insane amount of processing power for the price! Apple’s including more RAM (2GB 800MHz DDR2) and a better video card (ATI HD 2600XT), too.

With this update I think the Mac Pro will continue to dominate the top positions in the Geekbench Result Browser for some time to come.

This is interesting (and unexpected); people are filming their computers running benchmarks (like, oh, Geekbench) and posting the videos to YouTube.

Most are the videos are shot by people claiming that Windows is better than Mac OS X (or that Mac OS X is better than Windows), and that their Geekbench results back up their claim. I’m not surprised by this; platform debates are an incredibly popular (and passionate) pastime for a lot of people and Geekbench, being cross-platform, can certainly provide performance data that can be used to support claims that one platform is faster (and thus better) than another platform.

I just wish these video comparisons were better. While some of them are pretty good, a lot of them are rather suspect; some compare apples to oranges, while others seem to cripple one platform to favor another.

(via Coding Horror)

A video produced by Apple in 1996 comparing Windows 95 and Mac OS 7.5.2. Interesting if for no other reason to see how far both Windows and Mac OS have come in the past eleven years.

I mentioned last month that Ian Page, the developer behind Mactracker, was going to start including Geekbench 2 scores in a future version of Mactracker. Well, Mactracker 4.3 is out, and it includes Geekbench 2 scores for most Macs built over the last eight years. So now you can look at both the hardware configuration and performance results for recent Mac models using Mactracker, which is quite useful.

I’m sure by now everyone’s seen the iPhone “Will it Blend?” video.

As Deborah said, “Oh noes! Blending let the demons out.”

RetroMacCast mentioned Geekbench in their latest podcast while they were talking about Mactracker, a great application that provides detailed information on every Macintosh computer ever made. What does Geekbench have to do with Mactracker? Well Ian Page, the developer behind Mactracker, is including Geekbench scores in the next version of Mactracker. Exciting!

When I was setting up Primate Labs as a proper software company, one of the things I enjoyed the least was setting up the online store. Figuring out which payment processor to use in the first place was challenging enough, but integrating it with the online store was downright tricky! Of course, if I was setting up a store now, I’d take a look at Potion Store, Potion Factory’s open source online software store, um, software:

Potion Store is an open source Ruby on Rails application that powers the Potion Factory Store. The goal is to help new Mac OS X developers get up and running fast without having to sign up with services such as Kagi or Esellerate. The only thing you need to bring is your own license key generator and a PayPal or Google Checkout merchant account.

My friends over at Applecations have released the first (beta) version of Hourly, their super-sexy time-tracking application for Mac OS X. Congratulations, guys! It looks great!