Advances in User Experience

Here's another interesting article along the lines of, "How much have computers advanced the user experience?" A 1986 Mac Plus beats an AMD dual-core PC 9 tests to 8 over 17 different tests of Word and Excel performance. The article is rather tongue in cheek, but the perspective -- what does the user experience -- is one that we forget far too often.

One thing that's ignored in the article is that the Mac Plus cost you way more money in absolute dollars. Never mind that a 1986 dollar bought way more than a dollar today. Those that have written low-level code can also appreciate how much more work it is to maintain 32 bits of colour for each pixel, instead of one bit for the Mac's black and white display. (Personally I'm still waiting for a Vista theme that looks like a 1981 green screen monitor.)

Does this post contradict what I said here? You be the judge.