[appleinsider.com]

Longstanding Mac expert and self-professed "mad scientist" creator of the BareFeats website, Robert Arthur Morgan has died at home in Portland, Oregon.

Also calling himself Rob-ART, Morgan tested Mac hardware and wrote about his results on BareFeats from 1995 to early 2022. Everything he wrote on the site was based on direct test results conducted by him in his own specially-created test lab.

Morgan said on the site that he began the work because he "became frustrated with the performance bottlenecks of the Mac in the mid-nineties." He said that "Mac publications [of the time] tip-toed around the issues or made meaningless comparisons."

Consequently, he created his lab, tested Macs and peripherals, then posted detailed results. Unlike most reviewers, Morgan typically wrote little analysis, and instead relied almost exclusively on presenting results for readers to derive what they needed.

BareFeats test articles would contain graphs and results of every conceivable test. That degree of detail would then usually be followed by an extremely brief one- or two-sentence interpretation under the heading "What Did We Learn?"

The last hardware Morgan tested was the OWC Accelsior 8M2 PCIe NVME M.2 SSD solution in January 2022.

According to his obituary on the BareFeats site, his intention was always "unfailing fairness," and the goal was to "make Apple computers run faster and meet the designing needs of... users worldwide."

Robert Arthur Morgan was born in 1944, in Puunene, Maui, and died on March 12, 2022, in Portland, Oregon. He is survived by his wife, Betty Morgan, brother Harry Morgan, sister Clarissa Trammell, plus children and grandchildren.

Also:
[barefeats.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/14/2022 10:51AM by MikeF.

That's sad to hear. I really appreciated his work. When you have a few Mac upgrade options like RAM, hard drive, or buy a new machine to get a new CPU, knowing what will perform better for the tools many of us use was vital.

I once received a manufacturing sample of one of the first SSDs from a major manufacture. I loaned it to him to test.

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A sad day in the Mac universe.

Thank you, Rob-ART, for the priceless service you provided to the Mac community for so many years. You will be missed.

(P.S. I'm glad he lived to see the advent of Apple Silicon and the performance gains associated with it.)

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/14/2022 11:13AM by N-OS X-tasy!.

For over 2 decades Bare Feats was a website I checked daily. It was the first website I saw that did the exact Mac performance tests I was looking for. Inspired by him, I started my own site which was never maintained nearly as well as his and eventually disappeared like so much chaff. Later on, we argued (civilly of course) about statistical issues when presenting performance improvements, most memorably for me when Apple introduced the 1.42GHz G4s.

Rob-ART was as good as good guys come, always willing to improve and look for the important things in Macs and life.

RIP Rob.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/14/2022 11:37AM by Lew Zealand.

Wow, damn!

RIP

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“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in."

One of the good ones, gone.

His work helped me decide on upgrades against cost. The work spawned many discussions on this forum community.

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RIP, and many thanks for your service to the Mac community.

Great site. I always went there a month or two after a new Mac was introduced, to get the real scoop.

RIP

Very sad news. RIP.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

I loved barefeats back then.
RIP

End of an era :-(

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