The Mac Portable uses a 16 MHz 68000 CPU, so performance is about twice that of the 8 MHz Mac SE and Classic. The Portable and PowerBook 100 were the only Macs to use a 16 MHz 68000. The installed hard drive is a 40 MB Apple-branded Conner CP-3045 formatted with Apple HD SC Setup 7.0.1 (with any later version, it won’t wake from Sleep mode).

Remember that benchmarks are arbitrary. They measure certain types of performance that may or may not reflect the way you work.

Speedometer 3.06

The system was tested on 1998.10.06 under System 6.0.8, 7.0.1, 7.1, and 7.5.5 with inessential extensions off. Results are relative to a Mac SE or Classic, which rate 1.0. Numbers are rounded off to two decimal places.

The first set of numbers compares performance at different cache settings under System 7.1.

cache   CPU  graphics disk   math
 32 KB  2.15   1.82   1.25   1.95
 64 KB  2.15   1.82   1.23   1.95
128 KB  2.15   1.82   1.24   1.95
256 KB  2.15   1.82   1.24   1.94

The cache setting should have little influence on non-disk tests, which these numbers bear out. With this particular setup, cache size makes no appreciable difference.

The second set of numbers compares performance with different versions of the Macintosh operating system. In all cases, the disk cache is set to 256 KB.

Mac OS   CPU  graphics disk   math
 6.0.8   2.16   1.84   1.22   1.96
 7.0.1   2.16   1.83   1.23   1.95
 7.1     2.15   1.82   1.24   1.94
 7.5.5   2.15   1.82   1.13   1.94

Except for disk performance under System 7.5.5, results are virtually identical between version of the Mac OS. Testing with a 64 KB cache returned disk results of 1.22 to 1.23 for each version of the OS.

Speedometer 4.02

Speedometer 4 and later benchmarks don’t run on 68000-based Macs.

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