For everyday tasks, choose a Mac. A Mac+, that is.

For my whole life, progress bars have taken the same amount of time to complete. I remember downloading games for my PC-XT on a 2400 bps modem. It took just as long as it does to download games today. And I probably play games for the same amount of time. Are they better? In comparison, probably. Yet the experience of playing the games hasn't really changed that much (discounting first-person shooter motion sickness, that is).

In a similar vein, Hal Licino at Hubpages.com performs an amazing benchmarking test by pitting a twenty year old Mac+ computer against a dual core AMD with 1 GB of RAM running Vista. Obviously, the AMD is a more capable machine. But is it faster at what we do every day?

The result is enough to make a programmer crawl into a hole and meditate for the rest of his life.

When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

And that's just plain crazy.