Computer Comparisons and Excel Rant

I am the expectant owner of a new MacBook Pro - it's about time considering that I'm still stuck with a PowerBook G4.  While checking out the specifications of the new laptop, I became interested in how quickly the Macs I've used over the years have improved.  I put together some graphs going back to 1984 and the Mac 128K which indicate improvements in RAM, disk, CPU speed (not benchmark, just clock speed which doesn't really mean much), VRAM, and others.  The dates indicated are the Apple release dates to the nearest month.

The first graph shows how quickly the number of pixels available to me has grown.  For computers I've used which weren't laptops, I've just indicated the maximum resolution the computer could output.

More charts will come in a later post when I have more energy to fight with Excel.  It is honestly beyond me how companies can produce software such as Excel which is so phenomenally hard to use that it boggles the imagination.  Certainly it's not that bad for people who have learned all its quirks through everyday use, but for people who only occasionally need to use such software, it's a nightmare.  Aside from the graphs being impossible to select correctly (I'm always selecting the wrong component somehow), simple things like scrolling around with my trackpad don't even work correctly.  I gave up when my attempts to change the maximum range on the y axis failed miserably.  It would appear that this post has become more of a rant on Excel, but that's okay - software like this deserves rants.

Apple's "equivalent" called Numbers (part of the iWork suite) is definitely a breeze to use, but it can't do simple things like creating a chart with one axis based on dates (it spaces them all evenly).  The graph you see above was actually created in Numbers and then exported to Excel to plot the dates correctly.   The real question is why can't either of these companies get it right?  Microsoft's offering is cumbersome but fully featured; Apple's is pleasing to use but missing essential features.  Doh.