In non-interface related news, several people wrote in to point out that article on the dubious nature of the benchmarks Apple was using to back up their claims of the new G5’s impressive speed. Accordingly, I’d like to point out the response from Apple VP Greg Joswiak, which just went up over at Slashdot. Joswiak confirmed what I’d hoped myself was the case - the alterations noted in the original complaint were not intended to give the G5 an unfair advantage, but were intended to bring the stats of the prototype that was tested in line with the model that will actually be shipped. The original author’s biggest complaint was the apparent disabling of SSE2 in the rival machines, but this assumption turns out to have been mistaken: “As to not using SSE2, Joswiak said they enabled the correct flags for it, as documented on the gcc web site, so that SSE2 was enabled (the Veritest report lists the options used for each test, which appears to include the appropriate flags).” All in all, I’m not surprised that this has turned out to be not really a big deal at all. If Apple’s primary goal was to use deceptive, fudged benchmarks to mislead potential Mac customers about the capabilities of the G5, using an independent lab to produce the results and then publishing the entire report in full would be a pretty goofy way to go about it.