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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

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madeofpalk·

You didn't see the "1.7x more Excel productivity" chart from yesterday's new iMac?

https://youtu.be/eaB7nCdId0Y?t=364

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/28/24281965/honestly-this-i...

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It's funny that they advertise this because a Mac comes with a spreadsheet application that is hard to use and unbelievably slow. If they sent some engineers to work on that program they could get a 10x-100x improvement on the software side instead of grinding it out on the hardware side.

It's also funny because Visicalc was a big contributor to the Apple II's popularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

Yeah Numbers is nice for making cool layouts and convenient for its multi-table functionality in one page but it's also very lackluster in so many ways (no pivot for stater).

But the worst thing is by far its abysmal performance. Even simple accounting sheets get absurdly slow in the low hundreds of rows, no matter how powerful your machine is.

So, you might as well use a web app, like Google sheets that has other advantages.

To be honest it feels like they still offer their office suite just to say they have something else than Microsoft offerings, they have stopped caring about any of it a long time ago (with the redesign IMO).

While that sounds pretty funny I know people who actually burn the CPU on Excel so that might be significant. Granted they should not be using Excel for what they do but you know, it's easier than learning something new!

Once people learn Goal Seek and the matrix extensions to Excel’s macro language, it’s game over for corporate standard-issue Dell 11” laptops, that’s for sure.

I just assumed they were running one of the many "Office Productivity" benchmarks that are possible.

For example: https://support.benchmarks.ul.com/support/solutions/articles...

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