09-16-2009, 09:44 PM
I suspect you've not seen with your eyeballs a movie displayed via Apple TV, or a movie displayed by a Dell Mini 9 netbook that's been hacked and customized to act sort of like an Apple TV. If you could just watch each, I'm fairly sure you'd come to the same conclusion.
As it is, I think you're measuring theoretical performance differences between two sets of specs. Evaluating what it looks like on paper.
In actual use, the Mini 9 struggles to draw movies on the screen, hiccups, ever so slightly, and gets very hot. When pushing a video, it pauses for a microsecond every three seconds, in regular cycles. If it were a DVD player, this would be unacceptable, it would be boxed up and returned for a refund. The results are inferior.
But the Mini 9 fun to screw around with anyway. It satisfies the hacker-customizer-tweaker urge. Even though it's vastly more inconvenient to use, it's not without its geeky pleasures.
As it is, I think you're measuring theoretical performance differences between two sets of specs. Evaluating what it looks like on paper.
In actual use, the Mini 9 struggles to draw movies on the screen, hiccups, ever so slightly, and gets very hot. When pushing a video, it pauses for a microsecond every three seconds, in regular cycles. If it were a DVD player, this would be unacceptable, it would be boxed up and returned for a refund. The results are inferior.
But the Mini 9 fun to screw around with anyway. It satisfies the hacker-customizer-tweaker urge. Even though it's vastly more inconvenient to use, it's not without its geeky pleasures.