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Is Mac OS X Slow?
Junks Jerzey asks: "Every time there's a mention of Mac OS X on Slashdot, there's a flurry of responses about how unbearably slow Mac OS X is. To anyone who has done software development under both Mac OS X and Windows or Linux, is there any truth to this or is it simply a knee-jerk reaction from non-Mac users who see low numbers like 800MHz. I'm talking about average priced Macs here, like the LCD iMac line, not the dual 1.25GHz machines that sell for $4500+." Having the fortune of using a Titanium Powerbook for over a month, I don't find Mac OS X that slow at all, however, there are some things that do take a little longer than I am used to, but I think these things are application-specific. For those Mac OS X users out there, have you noticed operations that seemed slower using Mac OS X compared to similar operations on other operating systems?
but this damn thing is to slowwwwwwww
but that's because most of the apps I support are only supported in Mac OS 9, so I have to wait for the OS 9 emulation window to open up, slow, slow, slow.
A good test would be with native OS X applications, compiled for OS X and not just emulating OS 9, but that's going to take a while.
A. Rightmann
You should see it on my Powerbook. I have the base requirements, and it runs like Windows XP on a Pentium Pro 180.
NO.
for the most part macs are slow, but often times mine will outrun me around the block...yes it's true!
...it's running a micro-bsd kernel!
tcboo
The original release of OS X was slower, the newest version is noticably faster.
Of course, I have a dual 1Ghz G4 with a gig of RAM so YMMV.. ;)
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Look mom, flamebait!
I recently installed OSX on my wife's iBook (366Mhz, 160MB RAM)...it previously had OS9.x on it, and it crawled. Neither of us would even want to use it, it was so bad.
After installing OSX, it's runs amazingly well, and not just for the eyecandy, etc. Compared to other OS's, I would say it's right about on target...sure, it's a little sluggish opening Photoshop or having multiple browser windows open, but most 366Mhz machines are.
I'm kind of surprised to see this question at all...OSX has struck me as very fast, all things considered.
-Gabe
OS X feels slow occasionally and it has nothing to do with the graphical whiz bang extras that apple added. if your working with 6 or 7 windows, its a hassel in OS X switching from your IM list to email to browser and so on. it just feels sluggish when i can alt tab my way across win2k and everything feels instant. i love OS X but OS X is still an amature in rendering webpages as quicklly as win2k's IE6 or XP.
I went to the mall and brought up IE on an 800 MHz mac faster than it comes up on my 2GHz Windows box or Mozilla on my 2GHz Linux box. Perhaps that's all cruft from having a system that's heavily used, but it certainly seemed well tuned to me.
For those Mac OS X users out there, have you noticed operations that seemed slower using Mac OS X compared to similar operations on other operating systems?
No matter if they have, no true Mac user would ever say so, and you know it.
This is nothing new and you should not be asking for this. It is a known problem/limitation of the OS.
Have you ever tried to *resize, scroll or even change between big applications* (web browsers and other such magnitude apps)?
It is _godawfully_ slow. I have here a G4 with 1 MB L2 backside cache for it, and my Celeron runs WindowsXP a zillion times faster than OSX 10.2 runs on that G4. Linux runs faster on my Celerons than OSX on the G4.
Apple should start optimize and re-architect things if needed. I am not going to buy any new Apple hardware as long these speed problems occur even on their high end machines!
Most of the time when I experience any slowness, I chalk it up to some interference with my wireless connection to the basement. All command-line apps work well and speedy.
In sum, it rocks!
I used to have time to take a shower while waiting for 10.1 to boot in the mornings. 10.2 has it down to a few sips of coffee. Maybe it was that goddamn Happy Mac hogging memory all those years. Who'dve thought?
OS x was so slow that I sold my Macintosh over it... OS 9 was great... I hope they can bring the goods of OS 9 back in X
-r-
For web browsing and sending email - no. It's fine. I'm sure terminal.app and other text based apps also function just fine.
But as a graphic designer (who reads slashdot???) I can't use it. Period. Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, all run perceptively *twice* as fast in OS 9. And they do run fast in OS9.
From what I can tell, aqua is mostly at fault.
Is MacOSX slow?
or
Are Macs slow?
Uh... what?
For people who want to bash and criticise OS X, then of course it's TOO SLOW.
For people who enjoy and love OS X, then it's not all that slow.
There is definitely a class of people who need or want speed but don't have it, and they think OS X is slow. The hard part is figuring out whether their views and circumstances resemble yours so that you know whether to accept or discard their perception.
My view: OS X on a 400MHz G4 is fine. Applications my have a performance constraint due to slow CPU speed, but actual navigation of the OS is not a problem.
I also run OS X on a 933MHz G4. With a GeForce2, 768MB ram. Runs fine.
Slow always depends on how you define fast. Web browsing rendering is a tad slower and less optimized than under Windows, but on the flip side the HTML engine isn't integrated into the OS either.
And you really can't trust Microsoft to create a better browsing experience under OS X than under Windows XP, can you?
I use Mozilla just fine, though.
GPL Deconstructed
I remember using a Macintosh, it was called the 'SE'. I found that while it presented a nice graphical interface, it was far slower than a PC, and I've been a PC user ever since.
How is this news?
Dr. Joseph Hairston
Superintendent, CCBC
Yes
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Is MAC OS X slow as a server as well?
I was thinking of getting one in at work to test it out as a web server, but I will not bother if it is slower than Linux.
I use both os x and linux pretty extensively. I've used linux on macs as well (yellowdog and linuxppc). Linux *is* faster, from a user experience point of view and from a systems standpoint - However, this is on older (400mhz) G4's. The new iMacs (and by extension the new PowerMacs) are *much* snappier, but they would be in linux too. Harkening back to a post from a few days earlier, os x has about 85-90% the raw speed of linux on identical hardware. Considering the UI and application base, that's good enough for me. Besides, if you wanted straight-up hardcore power, you wouldn't be using a ppc. You'd be using a .357.
Your sentence.
"but this damn thing is to slowwwwwwww"
suggested grammar and spelling.
"but this damn thing is too slow"
GRAMMAR AND SPELLING CHECK COMPLETE: 15 minutes 23 seconds 67 ms
If you have a G3 (as I do) there is no question Mac OSX is slower than OS9. Now Jaguar is faster than 10.1 but not fast enough to overtake OS9 on G3 hardware. Most of this seems to have to do with the GUI. One good example is to try resizing any window. Due to the live resizing the window stalls, stutters and gasps to catch up to the cursor. Why they didn't give up on live resizing and use an outline is beyond me. Another example is scrolling. Open up a really long text document and scroll. For me, in OS9 it moves much faster.
... how fast would OSX be without all the "Aqua" GUI eye candy? If they had toned down the NEED for graphics accelleration how cool would it be? My only answer is it's all a plot to get us to by the latest and greatest Apple hardware. If OSX ran great on a G3 there'd be less reason to upgrade.
In general everything seems to be a few split seconds behind. Now I know I don't have the latest "G4" hardware or Quartz Extreme, but I ask the question
I asked my mac to get me a beer from the fridge, and I am still waiting.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
I use alot of machines from both sides of the war (Win/Mac) at school, but I've never really seen any two systems that are worthy of comparing. Obviously my desktop with an XP2100 starts/runs Photoshop much faster than my friend's TiBook (we both have 1gb ram) But then again, the new imac is shockingly snappy out of the box for what it costs and those two machines combined are easier to carry around than something housed in a full-sized Antec. Speed can be achieved by anything as long as you have the cash for it, and alot of the bottlenecks that show up in the sort of applications that I run on a daily basis are more dependent on the video card than the OS.
I run Windows XP w/ themeing disabled, and Windows GDI is amazingly fast. I also think MacOS9 is fast (until a process hangs...).
I've tried OS 9 and OS X running on the same lamp-y LCD iMacs. OSX is SLOW. Sure it may look cool, but just think of all the processing power required to render all that shiat!
I went to open a csh Terminal, and I seriously had to wait about 30 secs till I received the % prompt. Ridiculous. Plus the font smoothing is overkill. The video seems to choppy as well, probably due to all that complex rendering. Yuck. OS X, you can keep it, thank you. Mac OS X is what made the Mac as popular as it is. Unlike WinXP, however, you can't disable the new overkill GUI and revert to a "Classic" style.
I recently just installed 10.2 on my old blue & white g3 300. To me just the gui interface seems a little sluggish, not SLOW persay, but sluggish in resizing windows etc. This compared to the os 8.6 installation it replaced.
There are still some functions that OSX does not seem to handle as well as its Classic predecessor. OpenGL performance is at the top of that list. I have many games that run significantly faster in OS9 than in X, some even in Classic.
I'm not sure what exactly is the problem, but it does appear to be gradually improving. For example, upgrading from 10.1.4 to 10.2.1 allowed me to run Jedi Knight II with 4x FSAA and all settings at max in 800x600, rather than 640x480. If I turn FSAA down to 2, I can run it in 1024x768, but it looks better in 800x600.
The system itself is much faster in 10.2, probably at the level it should. But OpenGL needs work.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
I'm so ashamed.
Course, it's still faster then the Optiplex NT 4.0 box I use at work.
I have added a bunch of RAM. You want to have at least 256 MB RAM to run this puppy. The only time I have been unhappy with the speed was when I compiled GNOME. That took too long :).
still waiting for the windows users to post? heh
i am running an older mac... G4 400mghz running 10.2 with a gig of ram..... i think the pokeyness IS application specific for the most part. i upgraded my Rage128 card to a 7500 when i hopped to 10.2 and noticed it handles the aqua interface a lot better. there are also little things to do to zip up the OS (like under dock prefs switch from "genie" to "scale"), turn off dock magnification, don't use a 10 megapixel picture as your desktop.
obviously it's not as efficient as a very tweaked Linux or BSD box (with fast innards), but as an out of the box OS it's very usable. as always it's better running on newer machines, but i can use it on an older crt iMac G3 300mghz and not bang my head against the table. you might not want to do intense av work on that machine, but for day to day tasks (which iMacs were intended for) it will do just fine.
(flamers and other retards, please note this is not an endorsement of MS by counter-example)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
It may seem slow if you used OS 9 for a long time, then made the switch to X on the same machine. Windows and menus don't seem to "snap" as quick, and Classic will seem a little slower than native OS 9. So there's no real general answer here. Give me a dual-1.25ghz with Jaguar and native applications on it, and it'll seem very fast compared to my every day Pismo. During tight deadlines, sometimes I reboot to 9 since I can blast through menus and windows and it feels like the machine is working at "my" speed. But it really isn't a necessary thing for me to do.
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
Just kidding. But now that I have your attention:
Mac OS X 10.2 runs slow on every G3 I've seen, including my iBook (which, admittedly, is only 500MHz with a 67MHz bus). G4 Macs are a totally different story. On those machines, I've found OS X to be snappy and responsive. Even the 450MHz G4 tower I use at work runs well.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
"have you noticed operations that seemed slower using Mac OS X compared to similar operations on other operating systems?"
Simple answer, yes. Complex answer: Those systems aren't running Windows. Mac OS X is always RESPONSIVE. If a splash screen comes up, you can still pull another application in front of it. If an app is running a huge calculation, you can still web browse. iTunes doesn't skip. You can play DVD on your background (you have to set your background color to a specific value, start up the DVD, then hide the DVD player). You put a really pretty fish tank OpenGL screensaver as your background. Running many mpeg4s at the same time doesn't choke the system. It keeps going, in fact if you just add ram, like with any Unix system, you can throw any number of big jobs at it, and it will keep going.
That being said, you have to wait for the genie effect to take place. Because it's a friggen animation. Same with icon removals from the desktop. If you aren't running QE (which from what I know is most of the OS X installs today), you get a big CPU hit on moving windows, resizing, and putting in dock. But it still keeps going. I'm really quite amazed at how well it works, day in, day out.
Am I unpleased, no. Do I even consider other OS's. Not anymore. Can it be made faster, sure.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I am fortunate enough to be using a 400-something mhz G3 with around 384MB RAM and OS 10.2 at work.
I use it primarily for hacking in php, perl, mysql and the likes, which doesn't really require a lot of computational power. I use a lot of photoshop aswell, which is a somewhat different story. I am able to outperform photoshop in using keyboard shortcuts. That is, I experience a (sometimes significant) lag after keying in a keyboard shortcut sequence.
This has however little to do with the performance of the OS itself, which I find perty darn smooth. To me OS X has always been very responsive in all situations though programs (photoshop, golive etc.) take can take some seconds to start up. Apart from this the overall filehandling and mucking about is done with ease.
My two mere cents.
naah sig schmig
Moshe Bar has written an article at Byte in which he benchmarks and compares performance between Mac OS X and Linux at various tasks on the same hardware.
OS X on a 1.25 GHz machine is slower than NextSTep 3.3 on my old 25 MHz NextStation (16 MB ram).
I run OS X on several machines. The one I'm using now is the slowest I really use (a 400MHz G3), and it's fine with 512MB of memory. With 128MB it's slow. More didn't make much difference for common stuff.
:-)
In fact, it's deceptively responsive. I use a G4 733 at home, and sometimes forget how slow this thing is- until I do a big compile or something.
For ordinary GUI stuff, it's OK, but some programs that aren't really OS Xish (like Mozilla) sometimes have noticeable screen updates.
ab
from Windows to OS X, because of the UNIX underneath.
Let me just tell you that the networking is faster on the Mac than on windows, I can play higher quality streams without the constant re-buffering that I had in Windows.
I've got Mozilla, Chimera, and IE on theis machine, I use Mozilla the most - but that is changing, I like the look and feel of Chimera a lot it is growsing on me.
I do alot of surfing, and web development, and I am finding the mac to be faster in starting up applications than the windows boxes I've used...
Just my $.02
I used it on a two year old Power Book, and the speed seemed comparable to a Windows XP notebook with similar specs.
--They say only a fool looks at the finger pointing to the sky...
Hello. I use jEdit on a permanent basis. I have one of those 800mhz iBooks. I notice that its runs a lot slower than on my work laptop (1gz dell). Using Metal over MacOS Adaptive helps but its still not as fast and I lose the menubar at the top. my 2c.
yes it is slow.
You would have to be slow to think this chick would convice anyone to switch to a mac.
Janie Porche
When she says she saved xmas, I want to kick her in the face!
Live web cams
... the times I've used it, it's been like a damn drinking game! Some native apps seem okay if not especially zippy, but since I work in publishing, where the absolute key application is Quark XPress, converting to X is currently about as likely as Osama Bin Laden announcing a goodwill tour of the United States!
You must think in Russian.
It will take an extra minute to boot up but all your OS 9 apps will run immediately.
When talking about OS X 10.1 was slow on my G4 Tower 733, 10.2 is lightning fast (another reason it should have been a free upgrade to 10.1 users).
... but it can be slower (not to mean its unusable) for certain things, mostly to do with graphics. Web browsing for instance. Some of the browsers are better and some are worse, but from my experience all are noticably slower than browsing with IE, Netscape, et al on Win or Linux.
Part of the reason may be that I'm running a Rage iBook and don't have the ability to take advantage of QuarkGL. And things are getting faster with each OS update.
Having said all that my iBook is my primary machine. I wouldn't trade it for the world (except for a faster one, or a TiBook)
I run both on an iBook 500 with 256MB RAM. It is slower.
Here's the best answer you are going to get on this question:
On fast Macs, OS X is fast. On slow Macs, OS X is slow.
I'm experienced in this matter and I'm not trying to insult anyone, but there it is.
Then it sits idle until you need it. Startup and execution times are not noticably different on my old 400MHz iMac. About half the apps I use are still Classic apps, and I find it preferable to use OSX/Classic instead of OS9. The added bonus of not having to reboot the whole system when Word 98 hangs is worth it. Hurry up with OpenOffice already!
wow, on my ibook (500Mhz 256RAM) os 9 runs very quick compared to X. It's brutally slow while watching simpsons in quicktime and browsing the web in chimera. Going to console and renice -20 quicktime seems to improve things a little bit but i just boot back into os9 when i watch a dvd
Anyone have opinions/stats on the idea that OSX might be slower because of file-based instead of device-based swap? From what little bits I've read/seen, OSX is using a swapfile instead of your typical direct-to-char-device swapdisk. And I do know file-based swap can be slower because it's going through both the filesystem and drive io layers.
Is there a vmstat? Can anyone confirm/deny? Every time I see X speed questions/concerns this is the first thing I wonder. Or has someone an idea where to find swap comparisions between PPC/Linux, PPC/BSD (I presume there is such a thing) and OSX? If nothing else, I'd satisfy personal curiosity.
-fester
-'fester
OS X is fairly memory intensive. Anyone interested in speed should, IMO, max out their memory. After all, moving from the minimum amount of memory (128mb) to the maximum (640mb) on the low-end iBook costs you $200 and is well worth it.
Also, with Quartz Extreme adding additional amounts of video RAM seems to make a difference, since the graphics card is doing a lot more work in day-to-day life. 32mb seems to be noticably better than 16mb, with diminishing returns expected as you go up.
Just my opinions, yadda yadda...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
In my experience with one computationally intensive scientific application, a 800MHz MacOS X machine completed a task in 3 days that took around 4 days on a 1.2MHz PC running Linux and 5 days on the same PC running Windows 2000.
I posted this comment from my Mac... I hit the submit button on Monday.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
can i mod this story as flamebait?
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Ummm...10.2 is very fast and I've had no problems with speed on a lowly PBG4 400 384 RAM.
Just apple-tab to switch instantly between apps.
and the others users forget to do that. I thank you for your response.
A. Rightmann
I fell in love with Mac OS X when Jaguar came out. I decided that it was worth it to make the switch to the Mac.
Granted, it's a dual 1 GHz PowerMac, but I don't find it slow in the least. I created my first DVD movie using iMovie and iDVD just last night, and I was very pleased with how easy and fast it was. The resulting DVD played great on my Sony DVD player and the picture was superb.
I realize that I'm not using the "slower" Macs you're asking about, but I certainly don't feel like my PowerMac is any slower than an AMD or Pentium 4 system. In fact, my Mac is much faster at ripping music from CDs than any Intel based system I've used. Creating my DVD wasn't slow to me, either. I believe Apple has really optimized for the AltiVec extentions in the G4.
The fact that I can get good Open Source software, commercial software, and (in my opinion) the beautiful OS X interface makes me a very happy new Macintosh user.
If a tree fell on a florist, and nobody was around to hear it, would he make a noise?
It still isn't as fast as Linux or XP (IMO), but has enough polish that I still prefer using it. There are some things that count more than speed. I think OSX does well on those.
I must ask though why these rather generic OSX discussions keep coming up on Slashdot. They seem more appropriate for some forum rather than "news for geeks." Don't get me wrong, I love OSX. I can't wait for 10.3 which will probably be the final reason to pick it over other OSes. But does it really justify all these topics?
As I'm sure many of the people about to post here do, I use several different OSs during the course of my day. Once I leave work, I rely on OSX for me personal machine. Even with 10.1.5, almost everything seems faster than any flavor of Windows that I come into contact with. My home machine is a "lowly" Dual 533 G4 with a Gig of RAM, and it consistently performs better than any of my other machines... ranging from a dual 600 Pentium w/ NT4 to 2GHZ AMD w/ XP. I am running mostly Multimedia creation software, so maybe that's where the results come from... Anyway, OSX is plenty fast... except for some strange spinning beachball zone-outs at weird times. To be honest, even though I am one of those Mac people that will break a bottle on the bar and hold it to your throat for bad-mouthing my system... I am perfectly functional with Windows going all the way back to 3.11. Bottom line: OSX on a sufficiently pumped up G4 will get the job done, and get it done pretty quickly. Now back to the impending flame war...
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
I've used Linux and Mac OS X on both PPC G3 and G4 systems, and OS X runs considerably slower on both chips. It's not just about clock speeds here, because back in the day I ran YellowDog on an iMac 333 which ran smooth enough for having the wrong Linux video drivers installed. But with OS X on the same hardware I can hardly drag windows around. OS X needs a hefty G4, and plenty of RAM for Aqua to chew on or you really aren't going anywhere. Just try launching the Terminal with only 128M.
Not to say that OS X is a bad system, or that PPC hardware is inferior to x86. They're both really good systems, but Mac OS X just isn't optimized to run smoothly (and this has been admitted by Apple). The real problem is that they need to go back and redesign some things to bring back the speed. Right now all they've been caring about is appearance.
I haven't used Jaguar though, so I don't know how it compares. Besides, OS X is new, and it has it's issues. Speed is a major one. Hopefully they'll bring it in line in time for people to give it a decent chance. I'd love to switch my whole family off of windows and onto a stable, easy to use system like Mac OS X, but they aren't willing to buy a computer at double the clock speed of their PC and running apps slower.
I find startup to be slower, but then again I reset my ibook maybe once every three weeks when it downloads updates and requires a restart. Of course programs like blender don't run quite as fast as my Linux box, but its comaparing Apples (no pun intended) and Oranges. My iBook is a newer 14.1 700Mhz with 256mb ram and a 16MB video card, my Linux box is a dual 1.2Ghz AMD box with a 64MB video card and a Gig of ram... But honestly, OS X is a little slow on startup, even slower going into 'classic', but for everyday use, I don't seem to notice anything.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
My family is mostly Mac now -- my mom and sister have them, and I have one in part so I can follow their explanations when troubleshooting by phone.
... it's nice to have it in there full time, no card-edge to worry about snapping off ...)
And overall, now that I've made the switch (from 9 to X) more-or-less permanently wrt time spent on my iBook, I've stopped caring. The system is nice, and with Chimera and Mozilla (giving me browsing and IRC), I no longer feel any great need to boot into 9 for the speed.
Yes, it is slowish -- my old 366MHz ThinkPad 600 with 128MB RAM is *snappier* running Windowmaker or even KDE than my 500MHz iBook (with 384MB) running OS 10.2, but I find the speed differenceis not terribly annoying. And 10.2 is noticeably faster than 10.1, and esp. faster than 10.0.1
The Apple keyboard I could do without, but that's not really the OS's fault.
I prefer (for various reasons) any of several Linux desktops for day-to-day use, but the iBook, even this slow one, makes a nice station for editing home movies, 802.11 access, etc. (I wish other companies would license that airport space inside the machine
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Is it just IE that's slow on OS X?
I have a rev A blue and white g3/400 PowerMac running 10.2 and Photoshop 7 is *significantly* less responsive than Photoshop 5.5 was under OS 9.2. I can't say whether the slowdown is caused by the Photoshop upgrade (I hear they rewrote the rendering engine from scratch), or the OS change, but the net effect is I go bonkers waiting for things that used to be faster. Maybe PS7 wants a G4 w/altivec, which I don't have. I'd be interested in testing PS on a G4 to see.
---
I have Unix underpants.
Especially after installing service packs, XP is as lethargic as a democratic candidate on Nov. 6.
Now I have OSX running at 800mhz. It seems mildly slower compared to other Unices (this is without tweeking, though). Having never run PPC linux, though, I can't give a fair comparison.
Which raises the question, why am I even posting this?
My 700Mhz iBook running OSX 10.2 is quite snappy with all native apps, especially the ones I compile myself. It feels comparable to my 1.4Ghz Athlon running Redhat 8.0.
If you run MacOS 9 apps in compatibility mode, the feel is more sluggish, but that's to be expected. Emulation almost always degrades performance.
Openoffice.org for MacOSX is quite nice, BTW.
10.0.0 Public Beta was barely usable, in every way. It was beyond slow. It was almost a toy. The genie effect took forever.
10.0.0 release was slow. It was a pain.
10.1.0 was improved; my machines are quite old, and it showed.
10.1.5 was improved; as the last of the 10.1 branch, it showed improvement.
10.2 brought a noticeable improvement. I wasn't spurting my shorts but I could not recommend it to others without hesitation, with the exception of the guys that buy a new CPU every time AMD or Intel comes out with one, because the old was one "just too slow". Whatever.
Is everyone seeing the trend? Getting better all the time. I forgot who did the presentation, but the quote was along the line of, "We have to improve in software because we can't trust Motorola to speed up the hardware". Each new release boosts performance on the same hardware with no noticeable new bugs or problems (other than what Apple introduces on purpose, like breaking LiteSwitch w/ 10.2).
In short: it's sad that the unacceptable performance of older versions, esp. betas, has tainted a great OS with the moniker "slow".
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Maybe the clean install fixed it.
I have a G3-333 w/192MB and it runs 10.1 and 10.2 painfully slow, but OS 8, 8.6 and 9.2 are lightning fast.
Maybe you need a clean 9.2 install (or to patch it). When I bought my G4 Tower (733) 10.1 was really slow compared to OS 9. In fact I liked 9 better than 10.1 until 10.2 was released.
My feeling is that much of why OS X is slow has to do with the kind of eye candy that I turned off in Windows XP. I like Windows XP, don't get me wrong; I just disable as much of the tricked-out display stuff as possible because I don't need it and it slows things down interminably. People are always asking me "Why is your machine so much faster than mine?" and I show them why.
The usual gang of Slashdot trolls is whining... Surprise! But those of those who do *real* work know that OS X handles multithreading and synchronization much better than crapXPy. Sure, graphics speed needs improvement... Don't like it? Buy a PS2 and load that GTA CD.
The funny thing is when you run an application on OS X that is "classic", it uses the OS 9 look and fell and is blazingly fast, so what's slow about Mac OS X is Aqua. It is slightly ahead of the hardware available. With a constantly patched video driver on a 3Ghz Intel box, I bet it would be just as fast as Windows. The world may never know.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
It really depends on what you're planning on doing with it, and also if you're using a "stock" hardware configuration.
Case in point:
A 15" LCD iMac G4/700 "feels" much slower than my tricked out G4/450... here's why:
* 256 megs of RAM is absolutely inadequate for OS X, but I've been too lazy to order non-insanely priced RAM online for it yet (weird module, mega $$$ at the neighborhood instant-gratification superstore).
* Sometimes the stock hard drives on consumer-level machines are horribly slow (5400 RPM vs 7200 vs SCSI 10k makes a HUGE difference).
That said, my G4/450 is flying with a new Maxtor 80GB ATA/133, a clean install of 10.2 and 1.5 GB RAM.
Flying, meaning that I usually notice the machine running faster than in did in OS 9. And this is a dual-head setup to boot doing 3D and Photoshop work all day in addition to coding.
So that said, no OS X isn't slow -- but don't expect the machine to get out of passing gear without at least a RAM upgrade. Consider an extra 512mb chip $85 very well spent.
10.2 is very, very, very nice and a substantial speed improvement over 10.1. It "feels" as fast as OS 9 did now.
But then, to me, XP Pro running on a P4/1.4 laptop feels like it's dragging ass, so YMMV.
--dr00gy
Run 'top' and see just how much memory / resources OSX sucks up..Proc was at 31% last time I checked on my machine, and it was idle. ..It CAN be slow, of course I'm running it on a beige G3 266 / 384 Mem.. :(
--- "Just because you can....aw shit do it."
I have an ibook 700mhz 256mb ram. Its been about 2.5 months now since I switched from linux/windows and totally love it. Yes, it can be a bit slow. For comparison my other machine was an athalon 600 / 512mb ram.
specifics:
- getting a usable desktop during boot is faster in OSX than both linux (kde3) and win2k. (i dont consider win2k to be fully ready until after all the stuff has loaded when you log in)
- switching between open apps is far slower. there is a noticeable delay. Its not a totally fair comparison because of the RAM difference. For native apps like imail, ical, and chimera, it is a sec or two...for MS office it was a annoying delay. Of course office sux for mac. The files don't convert perfectly between win and mac office!! (i dumped the trial version).
- changing resolution is WAY faster - nearly instant.
- starting KDE is about the same, but useing it is slow (RAM again).
So, my conclusion is, it is the hardware, not the OS itself. If anything, the OS is faster than windows cuz the comparison is compareable on different hardware...
I have a first rev. low end G4 Powerbook (400mhz) with only 256 megs of RAM. (I know, RAM's cheap... I'm working on it.)
From the get go (OSX beta), typical OS level GUI functions were slower than what I'm used to in either the Mac Classic OS's or Win OS's. With each revision of OSX performace has gotten better, but some things still seem stilted (like resizing some windows - yes, some, not all; don't know why).
Application performance is another matter. I've never felt that any games, graphics apps, or even Project Builder lacked all the speed I expect.
Interestingly, I know someone with a Pismo Powerbook (G3 400) with about a gig of RAM who claims not to have the same sometime-stilted GUI that I perceive.
Perhaps that's more evidence against the mhz myth.
There's an essay at byte.com written by Moshe bar comparing the performance of Linux and MacOSX from a server point of view. Very interesting read.
Moshe Bar says: "The fact that OS X needs to improve in VM and I/O handling is understandable given its relatively young age." That is his opinion from testing XServe. (Note there was things he could have done to improve the test, but on a whole it was a good test.)
If you believe the press releases from Apple, 10.0 was the initial revision just to get beta testing and hardware bugs worked out with live users. 10.1 was the almost ready for prime time version: functioning apps and networking, but some performance lags due to the kind of semi-polished programming one is going to see in an object-oriented development environment for a completely new platform. OS 10.2 is supposed to be the fully optimized version, with slimmed down apps and streamlined graphics rendering.
That's the official version. My experience has pretty much reflected that. I am running 10.2.1 on a 300 mhz Wallstreet Powerbook and it runs great. Outside of little lags waiting for Photoshop 6.0 to render filters on the Classic environment (no surprises there) I find that it's running along quite nicely.
I have found that some of my Mac using peers that are whinging about performance lags are often running the minimum (or less!) of the recommended amount of RAM for the most graphics intensive OS on the market. Hello, Bottleneck, please RTFM before trolling for flames. And if it's driving you that crazy, may i recommend the command line? It friggin' rips along...
i only have reference to osX 10.0.1 to 10.1, i haven't used "jaguar" but i can say that osX felt slow at first. i created an OSX server with a brand new G4700mhz (not quicksilver but just before) with an initial install of 10.0.2 and then had to ran all the updates. now this server was acessed by only Macs running 9.0 and 9.1 and i would say that the macs running the "classic" OS were much faster on the web but were slower in the actual use of the OS. once again that was an early version. i must also admit that this was an impossible network to maintain, to much ADD made it difficult to organize the HUGE amount of files that were coming at this server.
Mozilla for OS X is the slowest OS X app I have. I still use it cause I'm totally addicted to tabbed browsing, but I sure wish it were faster.
(I know this is not an OS problem, it's a bloaty Mozilla problem)
It's a knee-jerk... has to be. I've got an old G4 500 that I just installed X.2 on... it runs so much faster than it did under 9.2 that it isn't even funny. Faster load times, faster even in Classic than Classic was when running as my boot OS. While some programs may be a problem (iChat) I haven't had any serious issues of yet. This is just another hit against Apple and the GHz myth... Tonight, I'm installing it on a 466 G3 machine... we'll see how THAT works... but I expect it'll have a speed boost.
I'm not conceited, conceit is a fault and I have no faults.
I have an 850 mHz Duron that I think is perfectly fast. I had a 1.4 GHz XP processor that I thought was just as fast. I have a 400 MHz Powerbook that I was going to upgrade to a 500 MHz processor, but didn't feel it was slow enough to make a difference. Put it in perspective, most computers are too damn fast, and an extra half a second to load a webpage is a pretty pathetic thing to complain about. On my Mac, I leave programs open without windows, so when I want to pop up a new window, it's pretty damn fast. Once I have Chimera opened the first time, it takes half a second to open up and display my default page (wireless and on a 400 MHz laptop). Pretty damn slow eh?
On the TiBook things like a find / are noticable slow (like on any other laptop I have had) and are much more bearable on a desktop G4.
Command line apps are speedy. Servers, such as apache and in particular Java/Tomcat/Cocoon or Forrest are incredible speedy; and outperforms a Netra T1 with ease.
And yes; if you run word, powerpoint, iTunes, 15 terminals, OmniWeb, Internet Exploder, 2 instant messengers and what not - the screen gets to be a little sluggish. But then again - it does not throw a wobbly, and actually lets me use that much, unlike my W2k machine.
In fact - I'll usually stay up without a reboot for months (until I do something silly; like changing the battery without putting the machine in sleep mode).
my laptop is a 600mhz iBook with 128mb of ram and an 8mb Video card...the bare minimum Apples says to run OS X.
I was running 10.1.5 on it and the thing was just to slow. I mean EVERYTHING was slow. Slow to open apps slow to use the apps slow to browse the Finder. I just stopped using it.
I installed a copy of 10.2 to see if that'd make a difference...boy was i sure happy i did that. Now everything is at LEAST 100% faster, with the same configuration.
Okay, I've got an indigo iBook (G3 366) running 10.2. I've run OS9 on it, as well as the public beta of X, 10 and 10.1. I've got a 900 MHz Athlon that has run 98, 2k and RedHat 7.3. So I've a bit of experience here with various systems at less than top-end speeds.
10 was unbearably slow. 10.1 was better. 10.2 is useable. I actually think for most native apps, it's faster than similar tasks in MacOS 9 were. It's certainly more versatile - I can get into SMB shares and the like. But that's not what the question was really asking.
So, how does it compare with the other OSes? Well, I certainly haven't done any real tests, but for just average use I find it pretty similar to my Athlon 900 except where things like MP3 player visualizations ore 3D performace go (and what can you expect when you're comparing a Rage 128 Mobile 8MB with a GeForce 3 TI 200?)
The big slowdown on MacOS X was always windowing, but this has been vastly improved with Quartz Extreme. I don't have enough graphics card to get the full benefits from it, but even on this old machine, resizing and moving have been much faster. In fact, it seems to perform better in that respect than XWindow on the Athlon, not that I find that terribly surprising.
I don't notice a big difference. In some cases, it seems a little faster. In some, a little slower.
... "I read part of it all the way through." -- Movie Mogul Sam Goldwyn (and some slashdot readers)
i have a 400mhz G4 at work with 384mb ram and a 500 mHz ibook at home with 192 mb of ram. now that i'm running jaguar (10.1 had some slowness on my ibook) EVERYTHING is super fast with the exception of MOZILLA chimera is still too unpolished to use (i'm a web developer) so i need to use netscape (ie on the mac is a just a nest of javascript bugs). please please please mozilla...make this wonderful browser (which i am using right now) work faster in os x somehow!
It all depends on what you're doing and how much you're doing of it. At work, I have a Dell Optiplex GX150 with a 1GHz PIII processor, if I'm not mistaken. This system has 256MB of RAM and runs Win2K SP3.
Typically, if I have 4 apps open (Outlook, SciTE*, Phoenix or Moz, PuTTY*) - when I launch IE, its unbearably slow - the screen redraws visibly and the system is generally unresponsive for the ~5 seconds it takes IE to launch. Not sure what causes this - 256MB of RAM is obviously part of the problem, but the swap file shouldn't be that slow, either.
Recently (this past Tues.) I was at home working on a few different things - ripping CDs to AIFF w/ Audion 3.0.2 (in batch mode), backing up 10GB of data from a ~19GB partition on a FW drive to a 8x4x32 CD-RW in an external FW enclosure (Dantz Retrospect Express), editing PHP files in BBEdit (6.5.2), updating site files in Dreamweaver MX whenever my partner needed something updated, checking mail via Chimera/Mozilla using Horde/IMP (web mail access), maintaining a connection to an FTP site (authenticated) and SSH site (publickey) for files I was editing in BBEdit and for Apache log files I was copying down to run through the Summary.net analyzer which was also running and serving out log stats to two clients who wanted temporary stats on certain logs (not available on our main server). Summary was also doing DNS lookups and crunching log file entries in the background while everything else was going on.
Now - was my computer slow? Well, Chimera/Moz seems to have a bug in entering data into text areas when the system is under high-load - that was unbearable. Otherwise, besides having to wait a couple seconds to switch desktops (using Space.app), other apps responded just fine. The multi-tasking on OS X is first rate, it really is. I managed to rip through ~15 CDs that day, in about an 8 hr time frame, while I had an amazingly productive day otherwise.
I'm running a classic iMac DV at 400MHz with a G3 system, unaccelerated by Quartz Extreme, as my AGP card only has 8MB of video RAM. If I can be productive on a system like this (and I have a pretty low ctrl-alt-del threshold, as a former prof used to call it) - then you ought to be just fine with one of the 15" iMacs running at ~700MHz with a G4 processor (which has Altivec - amazing, don't ignore that) and a few other enhancements over my machine.
Slow is all in the eye of the beholder. I know people that always use the fastest of the fastest machines from Intel when they come out. People like that will never be satisfied. I've had this iMac for almost 3 yrs now and every release of OS X has run faster (noticeably). Menus pop out faster, Finder responds faster, file searches execute faster, applications launch faster - the works. I look forward to my next hardware upgrade, just like the next guy, but for being productive - I can kick ass on my machine, and I give a lot of credit to OS X. My productivity is limited in various fashions on my Win2K machine at work - crashes cause some delays, but more minor annoyances cause far more delays.
Cheers.
actually, in all seriousness, if you have G4 processor and 256 or more of ram, you'll have no trouble.
OS X changes windows faster for me than Xwindows does in Linux. I think that the OS X GUI is alot faster than Xwindows and Mozilla is faster too.
In terms of UI speed, for macs running quartzgl, the differences between windows, mac os x, and linux are more or less just religious. My dad has an eMac that I could never complain about. App speed is... highly app specific. Some apps are ungodly slow for unknown reasons. It doesn't seem tied to carbon/cocoa. A large minority of bad apps are just oddly slow. Whatever.
For macs w/o quartzgl capable graphics cards, UI frequently bogs down the processor and makes even non UI performance pretty mediocre. Kill the GUI and run X, and you're doing pretty well in terms of speed. Not that you'd likely want to make that trade.
My 600 mHz ibook is the fastest mac I've ever owned, and it feels really slow because of the window manager. But I love it and my PCs are collecting dust anyway. If you get a new machine with a G4 and a real graphics card, I'm sure you'll never complain. The last two revisions of ibook have been quartzgl compatible, so I imagine they're not too bad either.
Yeah. Subjective.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Resizing windows is much slower in X 10.1.5 than 9, but I've become so used to it that I don't notice at all. however, when I go to work and use OS 9 rather than X (which is on my home computer), resizing windows is zippy, but I can't switch between applications very quickly during CPU-instensive tasks.So I think during heavy media encoding sessions, X is MUCH faster and more usable than 9.
I love all the eye candy. When I set the screen resolution (on my iBook) to 640X480, it's really zippy, but who wants that?
Bottom line: X feels slower than 9, but it's much more productive.
I'm on a dual 800, and I can tell you that a lot of things shouldn't be THAT slow. Take a finder window in list mode, with 300 items (waow 3 hundred). You can actually see the list getting updated as you scroll down. It should snap right at your face. (I have a geforce3 too).
Now people say that when everything is native, everything will be fine... I must say that it won't happen as long as cocoa remains as it is. Have a look at Mail, for example, or any app written in cocoa. Remember that cocoa was designed so that programmers could write apps quickly, NOT so that apps would run quickly.
When I switch mailboxes, for example, I wait entire seconds to see the screen update end...
I can still remember the wwdc in the 90's when the powerPCs were becoming more common. An apple engineer told us that we could now spend more time in complex processing because the processors would keep up with the increasing cpu needs... says it all...
(PS english is not my first language, sorry about the lousy english...)
When you consider that NeXT came out on 68030s, the thing should whiz on my 300Mhz 604e processor. It doesn't, but it is bearable on G3s, and works really well on my eMac.
All that said, Java is slow. I run netbeans all the time on a 850Mhz P3 running windows, and it blows away the 700Mhz G4, which is supposed to be SO much faster than my 850Mhz P3, right Apple? (Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge)
I love my Mac..for starters.
But my "old" (it's not THAT old) G4 dual 450Mhz machine can be pretty slow with both X and/or classic apps. I found using CodeWarrior to be slower in X as well.
Sure, get a more recent machine, right?
I would first ask, do you find the App's slow, or the OS? I'm running on an 450MHz G4 with a Radeon graphics card (1GB of RAM). Prior to 10.2 I typically waited for the finder under several circumstances (sort by type), but otherwise the OS is very responsive.
The biggest problem I've found is unresponsive apps (IE). These often times seem to be the carbon applications that have been ported over to MacOS X. Having worked with both Cocoa and Carbon, I'm not sure if it's an issue of these apps still using some of the older (but supported) Carbon event messaging that tends to be much slower under MacOS X (because they have to wait their turn now instead of being able to monopolize the OS).
The old style of application loop was written like:
while(!done)
{
gimmeEventNowDamnit();
handleEvent();
giveOutAWeeCycleToEveryoneElse();
}
Of course now those applications are forced to wait in places they previously didn't have to.
New applications can attach event handlers to certain events, so that call back routines are fired only when certain events happen. Carbon application written in this manner tend to be more responsive (not being obnoxious like above).
Cocoa also uses the idea of receiving messages, if it doesn't need anything from the OS it doesn't ask, if something happens that it should handle, it does.
I think the real issue comes down to Apps. I've never found the OS to be particularly slow.
Cheers.
- Sighuh?
Remember, these comments on OSX all based on 10.1.5, not 10.2 (Jaguar.)
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Simple file moving operations can take FOREVER if you are moving around hundreds of files. Though I haven't tried it, I am sure that from the command line, it could be a blink of the eye.
.zip files, and move them to another folder that already contains 3000 MAME ROM .zip files. Some may exist already and need to be overwritten and some files are new ones.
Example: Select, say 600 MAME ROM
An operation like this on Windows takes very little time to do. MacOS X can take many minutes to do the same. I don't understand why. This is on a G3 500Mhz iMac DV w/1GB RAM.
The underlying OS is very fast. The GUI/Finder needs all the help it can get. Even after 10.1 and 10.2!
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
I think the question is really one of perceived speed. I noticed that on the AMD box, and Win2000, the common behaviour for screen draws is to wait until the operation is finished, then draw all-at-once. For example, IE, when loading a page, will remain exactly as it is (the current page you're on), until such time that it loads Slashdot, then draws it in one fast swoop.
Now, OS X does this as well, but it tends to give more feedback. The browser window will turn white, then the banner appears, then graphics and text. I've timed both boxes - they render within a half-second of each other (again, subjectively). The OS X box could easily give the impression of slowness. But it isn't really.
There are some things in OS X that need improvement - notably window-sizing - but then again, the Win2000 box still does outline-drawing for resizing so it's not fair.
In the end I think Quartz Extreme is Apple's answer to this. Quartz does a hell of a lot more work than the current Windows drawing scheme, and it looks a hell of a lot better. When OS X first appeared, many lamented the excessive eye-candy. Now we have a scheme where your normally-dormant hotshot GPU is helping out with drawing the OS. It makes a gigantic difference, and takes a major load off the CPU. But it is version 1. It will get better.
I expect Microsoft to go through similar growing pains when they go for the photorealistic desktop in Longhorn.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Doesn't Objective-C suffer from the same performance problem as Java in that there is no early-binding by a linker of the explicit functions/methods that will be called in an application?
Is late-binding the largest cause of poor performance in OS X? And, if so, does this mean that GNUStep is a bad idea?
I notice the same slowdown browsing in Mozilla. Explorer is slightly faster, but more prone to locking up randomly...
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
I don't get it...
I have no idea, but the trend is noticeable.
Could be a memory problem, not a CPU problem. MAC memory is is crappy and $$$ (or used to be - I used to wholesale chips but got out 3 years ago).
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
I find graphics in macos to be slow. Moving windows around in KDE is painful. Compared to in linux, X is almost unbearable. However, compiling is fast enough, so the hardware itself is quite fast. Since the graphics are controlled by the OS, I'd say that yes, OS X is slow.
One thing that is definately slow is Virtual PC on Mac OS X.
I have been booting into Mac OS9 just to run some custom PC apps - I can't run Virtual PC under OS X without some pain. (This is on a recent ibook2 loaded with memory)
Come to think of it- the slow peformance is probably related to the app- Connectix Virtual PC.
It doesn't run under MOL (Mac On Linux) either, and Connectix doesn't really even try to resolve open software incidents.
Ive got both running OS X the Ti has Jag on it and the G3 10.1.5, and there is very little difference in the speed of the two. I find that OS X runs fast enough for all of my needs. I have never had a problem running OS X since 10.1 came out.
Each point-level of OS X has gave significant speed boosts. I've seen 10.2, and just about everything works as expected. There's a bit of slowdown playing Warcraft 3, but it's more of a power management issue than it's an OS X issue. It's all depends on how fast "Fast Enough" is. Personally, I see no use for a 2.x GHz processor. It seems like overkill. Yet I know people who whine about having anything less than 50 fps on a game, or above certain rendering times in Photoshop. It's more of a perception of speed, then actual throughput.
This
I have the 700Mhz iBook that comes with 128 megs of built-in RAM. It took an awful long time to open explorer, longer for netscape 7, and pretty long for even a terminal. Last week I bought a 512 stick from Crucial and now the thing just kicks ass in every way. I can't believe how much more enjoyable it is to use now.
And for anyone that wants enjoyment, I offer the following equation:
iBook + 640MBs RAM + Airport + Pokerroom.com + Monday Night Football on 53" TV = Awesome
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
I run OS X 10.1.5 on a Powerbook G3 500 w/640meg RAM. It's not as 'snappy' as Windows 2000 on an Athlon 750 w/1GIG.
My wife's got a year-old iBook with 384MB of ram that I just upgraded to 10.2. It dosen't seem very slow to me when running Photoshop, Word, etc.
However, the damn thing takes a good three minutes to start up. My Dell laptop boots into XP Pro in about 45 seconds and Redhat 7.3 in 1:30 or so. Shuts down real quick, but man does it crawl on startup.
Seems like Apple and their hardware/software integration could come up with something that boots up in ten seconds or less.
osX has a minimum requirement of 256mb ram to operate properly.
I use Mac OS X 10.1.5 exclusively and it is definitely not waiting for me most of the time. 10.2 makes little difference on my non-QE G3 system. (The G4 is a bastard processor!)
Maybe there's a faster OS out there for me, but as long as the work is getting done and I don't have to reboot, I don't care.
It is still missing some features I like and is obviously still under development. But the recently released 0.6 version is pretty amazing.
That's pretty good scientific method guys. Thank god we've settled the question once and for all.
Ash OS durbatulk, ash OS gimbatul, ash OS thrakatulk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul! Uzg-MS-ishi amal fauthut burgulli.
Check it out
E
My life is dedicated hosting
Wait, theres no article to slashdot??? and most of the posts don't say IANAL(but I play one one /.)??? Whats going on? You mean some of us are going to have to think and make insightful comments instead of kneejerk linux clustering responses? But we haven't cost somebody two heads and an arm for bandwidth!
Where are we going, and what are we doing in this handbasket?
..and now running Mac OS X 10.2.1 on a Powerbook G4 DVI 667MHz - yes, sometimes I find things slower than what I'm used to. Sure, browsing the web isn't as snappy as running Galeon was on my Thinkpad R30 Celeron 900 MHz. No matter which browser I now use. Internet Explorer is a lot slower, Chimera is quite a lot faster than the former but still not as snappy as, for example, Galeon. And, sure, running Java applications is still slow compared to the Windows equivavelt.
But still - it doesn't slow me down. I don't feel irritated because it would be slow. It's not something I think about. It doesn't bother me. It's not two words I connect. Mac OS X. Slow.
And, of course - define slow. Everyone will have a different opinion about this one. I'd say it's not slow because it's not slowing me down in my work.
I would like to separate slow and not as snappy.
Leif.
OS X is very very slow at some things on my 400Mhz G3 iMac w/ 512MB RAM. But it's only slow with things like loading webpages, opening programs, and scrolling windows. You know, the kind of things people hardly ever do anyway. Other stuff, like moving the cursor side to side and dragging icons around is just as fast as OS 9, I swear.
Seriously though, OS X is very good at doing more than one thing at once and I/O throughput for network, firewire, USB, etc. is very much improved over OS 9. The feeling when switching back to OS 9 is that it is much snappier, but I find myself less productive in 9 because I tend to use many programs simultaneously and OS X excels here, even on a slow iMac. Hell, I even use OS X on my old 9500/333Mhz G3 and it is DOG slow but I still like it better than 9. The key to remember is that OS 9 is fast because it is highly geared toward doing one thing at a time as fast as possible, and other key fact about OS 9 is that it completely sucks balls. (I am totally qualified to say this because it is true)
From my experience, OS 10.0 and the beta were extremely slow. However, 10.1 and 10.1.5 were tons faster. 10.2 is noticably faster again.
At this point, I consider it to be a pretty zippy OS. Go to a mac store or a Comp USA and test drive them. The interface feels good and responsive. People that complain about it being slow might be running it on a slow machine, might not have played with it since 10.0, etc. Or perhaps little transistions and such like the genie effect make it feel slow to some people that aren't used to them.
My personal machine is a B&W G3 that I've upgraded to a G4 550. It has 256MB of ram and a rage orion (rage 128). 10.2 runs fine on it. I have very few complaints. (If I don't buy a Tibook soon I'll be putting a Radeon into it though. The video leaves a little bit to be desired).
i have a g4/450 384 megs of ram, is the GUI faster then it was in 9? heck no. if i click on a folder in the dock to get a list of files in that directory then i will most certainly be greeted by the beach ball (at least it looks better in 10.2), yeah browsing seems slower. i could get more ram and it would help. none the less, how many times would i reboot os 9 a week, hmm usually once every 3 days, about a minute or minute and a half to boot up, i figure im at least breaking even, and, at least in os x i get all sorts of nifty things i didn't have in 9. yes i'd like it to respond quicker, but os x is such a joy to use i really don't mind, and once i can get a newer box, or a new processor, then all of these problems will be alleviated.
all the machines ive played with at apple stores, os x is perfectly snappy.
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
Typically, I see the OS X behave slowly in Finder more than anything else. Within applications, I don't see much (if any) performance hit, but when switching to finder or minimizing a window, OS X can be very slow sometimes. This has improved a lot from 10.0, but it is still MUCH slower than OS 9.
Application launch time is another area in which Apple needs to work on. They instituted a new pre-binding mechanism into jagwire, but it has had very little effect on launch time.
For those Mac OS X users out there, have you noticed operations that seemed slower using Mac OS X compared to similar operations on other operating systems?
In the time it takes to switch from Mac to Windows XP, switching from Windows to Mac has been done many times over...and the switch from Mac to Windows actually FAILED!
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
I'm going to try and be objective here. I've run a variety of machines over the years, I used to be militantly pro-linux, although since I've graduated I interact daily with machines running Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, Windows 2000, Windows 98, etc etc.
:).
I tried OS X because I heard great things about it, I really needed a notebook, and configuring linux was beginning to take up too much of my time. It takes signifigant effort to maintain and tweak linux, and the temptation is too much to ignore. The titanium powerbook was sexy, offered true instant on, and would run long enough to let me code for 4 hours on a charge. That's what sucked me in. I think it's a great os, it has great integrated development tools and documentation bar none. It is expensive, but so is my time.
That said, OS X is still a lot slower than a comparable machine running windows or linux. Programs run fine - never had a problem there. It shows in the Finder, mainly. Explorer is something windows did right, and it is very, very, very, very, very fast compared to finder. Put a few hundred files in a directory and launch finder, and you will be waiting. The graphics were a little laggy in 10.1, but that has been solved with Quartz Extreme in 10.2. The transparency is really quite beautiful, and doesn't come at a cpu hit. This is on a second generation 550mhz Tibook, so it is comparable to the machines asked about here.
Finder is slow. There are reasons for that, but finder is very, very slow. People who have run macs all the time will not notice it, people with large number of files moving from windows will be driven insane.
Trust me.
Yes, everything else makes up for it
The command prompt, sweet, sweet bash, is lightning fast, so I don't usually notice. The rest of the OS is acceptable, and the slow finder is definately tolerable given how nice a machine this is otherwise. I'll be upgrading to a 1ghz powerbook in the new year, and it'll be faster still, but the finder is still going to be dog slow compared to windows. Office, Mozilla, everything - they run great. I really like the Tibook, but I'll say it again - finder is very slow.
This appears to be a software issue, and I hope it will be resolved. Mac people can be in denial or refuse to accept things, and I really love my powerbook - it's my primary machine, when I'm not doing something on my workstation. That's job specific to vhdl or pspice - most EDA tools, used to make the toys you all love, are windows 2000 based now.
Forget about making use of a directory with 500 mp3's in it. It ain't gunna happen on a mid range machine.
Please fix this apple! Otherwise, it's a great OS, but remember it hasn't hit it's second major revision yet. There is definate room for improvement, and I hope I will see it soon.
My $0.02.
..don't panic
I'm only using 0.5, but it's still way slower that Moz on Windows, or Opera on FreeBSD.
OS X Jaguar runs significantly faster on my 266Mhz beige G3 with 128MB ram and 6MB of video memory and the built in RAGE PRO graphics controller than it does on my 400Mhz B&W G3 with 768MB ram and a 32MB Radeon card...I don't get it, it is the weirdest thing...I'd think that even if there was a problem (which I can't for the life of me find) the sheer difference in capacity and power would make the B&W machine run at least as fast as the beige one.
Frag 'em all...
When she says she saved xmas, I want to kick her in the face!
And then fuck her in the ass, right?
Earlier versions of OS X were pretty slow relative to Classic. It's sped up considerably since then, but the reputation persists.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I upgraded my wife's iMac 333 from OS8 to OS10.1 and it was definately slower. But then I got her a new 800Mhz G4 and OS10.2 screams. The thing boots in like 10 seconds and the apps are wicked fast.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
It is painfully slow compared to Windows 2000 on a P3 733, Windows XP on a P3 866 and Redhat linux (KDE)running on a compaq laptop running at 700 mhz.
The *CPU* may be faster (I dont agree with this) but the OS is sluggish and doesnt multitask GUI apps as well as Windows or Linux. Resizing windows scrolling through large documents, moving between windows when you have more than 2 or 3 open is all sluggish and annoying. The slowness is to the point that it bothers me and slows me down so it does affect my productivity. It would help a lot it OSX has some options to turn off all or most of the eye-candy.
BTW. I am a developer doing c++ and java development as well as working a lot with photo editing and of course a lot of web browsing.
Considering this I personally prefer XP. I think the GUI and multitasking is the best of the bunch followed by KDE, then Windows 2000, and then MacOSX. I think in a few years once the hardware catches up and the OS is optimized more OSX will be awesome and will be really more of a reason to switch.
On my G4, with classic running, OS X takes a big hit and gets kind of jerky. I'd say, if you're not useing a classic app constantly, to leave it off. It boots in about 10 seconds anyway.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
"Is BSD dying?"
"Are Linux users zealots?"
"Is religion bad for society?"
My wife and I both use our iMac (G3 500, 256M RAM) for multimedia work (she does voice work, I do graphics and some audio) and OSX outperforms OS9.2 on the same system. I don't find it slow for anything. I use Linux on my main box, she uses Win2K, and the OSX holds it's own just fine.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I have a 400Mhz iMac and a dual 867Mhz G4 tower.
MacOS X 10.X is unberably slow on my iMac. On My dual 867, MacOS X is faster than macOS 9 but I run out of ram with 256 Megs (it starts to swap like a crazy man).
At a guess.. If you have any G4 with any video card with 32 megs of ram, MacOS 10.2 will be usable. The reasone: MacOS X is written with altivec and a 32 meg video card in mind. Anything less and you are doomed. Having a G3 and a crap video card means you are Windows 98 on a 486..
The wierdest thing in macOS X is the number of windows on your screen and the size they are is directly proportional to how much ram is taken up.. The more windows the less ram is free. I got to a situation where I was disk swapping like mad, so I closed about 20 full screen windows I had open in the two progs i was using (transparent terminal windows, code windows etc).. All of sudden the computer was much faster and swapped far, far, far less). The reasone for this is every window takes ram no matter if it is visible or not. So 20 windows at 1200X1000 * 32 bit colour = at least 93 megs or so. fun eh? That's in addition to the progs you use + the amount of ram MacOS takes up anyways.
Their Java implementation rocks. Cocoa applications are fast. The Aqua UI is snappy, epecially considering what it's doing.
Consider this: Aqua renders everything in PDF. It make perfect use of anti aliasing, shadows, fading, zooming and window effects. It does what KDE, Gnome and Windows users only dream of being able to do. And at what price? In general, the UI is as snappy as MS Windows or X-Windows. Acutally, in some senses it's faster and it is stable. In my experience, this GUI is just as fast as Windows and KDE and Gnome, while doing a hell of a lot more than any of these other interfaces do to paint a pretty picture.
OS X isn't slow. Aqua isn't slow. PPC chips aren't slow. This OS and GUI kick ass.
If you are a Mac OS X user and feel the GUI is slow, I have to two recommendations:
Both of these help immensely with any speed issues you may be having. RAM definitely makes the biggest improvements.
as soon as i OSX was released i started developing some apps for it. i was doing linux development before that and as soon as i switched to OSX i havent looked back. It is a huge leap ahead of OS9, which was buggy and bogged down with needless coding. OSX has a much crisper structure and anything that you might find a problem in OSX you can fix it yourself as you normally would on a linux machine. Quartz extreme also made a huge difference with the UI. So 10.1 may have been slow, but Apple ironed out most of the bugs and if any new ones come up have fixed them with their software update function. They are quick to release patches and updates. Coming from a Linux/BSD perspective, i dont think OSX is slow at all, if anything it is as fast if not faster. buti guess with all the money apple threw into r&d with osx, you'd hope it would be.
Launching Java applications is particularly painful. However I guess that's a tradeoff you accept when you develop Java apps. Launching an OS X Java app seems faster than Windows IE loading an Applet though.
All this said; I've only tried 10.1.5. I haven't tried Jaguar yet, and it's supposed to be much speedier overall.
Random is the New Order.
On an old 450Mhz G4, with 512MB of ram, the system runs really quite well. The only speed difference I can actually feel is menu drawing. It was a bit faster using OS9 on this machine. Responsiveness also seems to depend on what apps your running. I recently opened up IE to pay some bills on sites that didn't support Mozilla (chimera), and got a little frustrated at how unresponsive it was. So, at least in my experience, things run just fine.
Alex
After dealing with all the dependencies and all that other crap. If you call that speed, then I think you are a little crazy. Mac OS 10.2 is the fastest operating system I've ever used. Not in terms of raw speed but when I consider the ammount of time it takes me to get things done, Mac OS X beats Windows, Mac OS 9, FreeBSD, and Linux hands down. Mac os X is relatively speedy for everything but web browsing and being able to use major commercial Applications is great. I own a Powerbook 667 and take it with me everywhere. My computer has crashed three or four times in the year I've had it and I only restart it after updating the system software.
"I don't find Mac OS X that slow at all, however, there are some things that do take a little longer than I am used to, but I think these things are application-specific."
I don't think people are refering to things that you normally have to wait for (saving large files, searching your hard drive, etc.). It's the little things like the way that objects like windows and scrollbars lag behind the cursor in most drag operations, and how mouse wheel scrolling is often very jumpy, especially in web browsers. There are often short but annoying pauses before the Aqua animation effects (Dock magnification, genie/scale zoom, fades, etc.), and some of them are just plain jerky.
I'll admit my only real experiences with OS X (PB to 10.2) are on 300 mhz (G3/Radeon) and 400 mhz (Powerbook G4) machines and I guess it might be a bit better on the newest systems, but considering my 10 year old 25 mhz Centris running system 7.1 or 7.6 sometimes feels faster, I'm far from satisfied.
Anyway, I blame Aqua/Quartz, and I'd like to see an optional UI like the way that Windows XP let's you switch off the Luna effects and more for better performance. And I wont get into the difference between it and my Athlon 1800+ box (Windows/Linux), but I'll say that I doubt it's just a mhz gap...
I recently installed OSX on a really slow machine : an original bondi blue 233MHz iMac with ONLY 96MB ram. Theoretically not even sufficient to even run OSX. Previously, the machine ran yellowdoglinux and was not usable at all : launching Konqueror took forever. I never succeeded in getting openoffice fully launching the wordprocessor.
:-)
OSX On the other hand runs perfectly ! No hickups at all. Slow, admittely, but that's only due to insufficient ram. I auto-launch at startup :
- apache/mysql/php/openssl suite.
- Projecttimer
- DynDNS client
- Chimera
- process monitor
- terminal with at least 5 sessions
- fuzzyclock
- mail
booting the machine up to ready-to-use point takes nearly 10 minutes. A drag. But once it is there, I can use all these apps perfectly well. Switch times are well under 1 sec. Occasionaly I launch MS Office and keep it swapped away. When activating it, it's there in less than 10 secs. Considering it needs 100MB on its own, that's nearly a miracle !
Honestly : OSX is amazing in its speed. The gui is a tad slow sometimes with the fancyschmancy transparency in menus and all that (no QuartzEx here) but once you got you windows positioned and you're not dragging stuff around, it runs smototh enough for every average user.
My tiBook667 on the other hand screams like a scramjet. Beats every other OS in speed for me. I work twice as fast on it compared to the WinXP P4@2.7Ghz next to it with a GeF4ti4600.
In fact : I only use that PC for warcraft and DooM3 alpha
which brings us to the one thing that OSX sucks at : openGL drivers of the radeon series are poopy at least. Most PCs play games better than macs, but hey, you've gotta give'm something to do, right...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
To be more specific, OSX 10.2 on a 1G Tibook with 512M RAM is slow. The UI feels sluggish and unresponsive, and while I spent only about 30 seconds in an hour watching the spinny-cursor thing, it seemed to take a long time to respond to my keypresses, clicks, etc. The only application I used enough to notice speed was Word (which was ungodly slow - I could type faster than it could spellcheck), though I'm perfectly willing to blame Microsoft for that. I will admit that I'm unfamiliar with OSX and that may contribute to my perception of slowness (in particular, I hate how clicking on something in the dock doesn't do anything, and then a half-second later or whatever, after I've clicked 4 more times, it starts to bounce. And bounce. And bounce.) though I can't blame an anti-mac attitude, as I went in hoping and expecting the tibook to be as cool as the specs indicated. Now if only I could find a demo Toshiba Portege and an IBM X-series to look at too...
This is compared to Redhat Linux or Windows 2000 on a 667mhz Duron with 768M SDR RAM on a KT133 chipset.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
On my Beige G3/266 with 320 MB of ram, it was usable but slow enough to be painful at times. Certain operations were worse than others. I only ran as far as 10.1.5 on that machine.
I now have a Dual 1.25 GHZ G4 with 1 GB of RAM and the speed is as good as I could want it to be.
In some cases I think the animation gives the OS the illusion of being slower than it really is. If that was completely turned off it might be percieved to be much faster.
However even if there is a tradeoff in speed vs OS 9, I think that the stability and features (unix command line, better networking, etc) makes it well worth the switch to Mac OS X.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Is it a little bit slower than a 4 GHz Pentium IV running Linux with no window manager? For most things, of course. But that's not what I'm assuming you're comparing against. Its speed is very nice on my PowerBook, and it certainly never slows me down. In all seriousness, go to a CompUSA or AppleStore if there's one near you. If at CompUSA, try to talk to one of the guys wearing a shirt with a silver Apple logo on his back; he works for Apple rather than CompUSA. Tell him you are curious about the responsiveness of OS X, and ask to play with it. Then do. I don't think you'll be disappointed,
I have had pretty good experience using many different operating systems.. I use Linux & Windows on a daily basis, and I have had experience with a few different versions of MacOS and a few different flavours of UNIX.
I think it has improved with age.. my opinion comes in three parts.
My first experiences with OSX were with when it was still relatively new.. I remeber getting my hands on a Titanium iBook with an earlier version of OSX on it, and I absolutely loathed it. I had a little click around, enjoying the eye candy.. but then I tried to play a DVD on this fresh out of the box system and I was getting locks and freezes, the system was slow and unresponsive - I was really let down as I had been looking forward to trying OSX for a long time.
Since then, I was given the task of putting OSX on some more Titanium iBooks - I believe it was at revision 10.1 then... I pretty much decided after installing a few of them that OSX was a fantastic operating system - it was vastly improved in so many ways. Faster, more reliable, and even DVD player worked properly. The downside was that even with 512MB of RAM, the system still struggled from time to time - and I even got an out of memory error.
Most recently I got a chance to use a Dual G4 system stacked with 1GB of RAM, preloaded with 10.2 Jaguar.. this seemed to be the best version yet. Very quick, very flexible, and very stable..
Though my biggest concern was that it took that much horse power to make OSX run nicely - I wonder how it performs on lower models?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I've got a TiBook (about a year old now - 677Mzh or something like that), and it's not that bad. I do find some of the graphical tasks a bit sluggish (Omniweb, which is a pretty good web browser (plug for my brother-in-law who works at Omni), is a bit slow...), but since I spend most of my time at the command line using Emacs, the overall -feel- of the system is pretty good.
OpenStep was always a bit slow - but it was bearable since it was such a nice system to use. OX-X falls into the same category.
As always, the more memory the better - if you can avoid swapping, you'll make the system perform that much better.
I happen to have a 15" iMac. 800 mhz G4, 768 MB of RAM, running Mac OS X 10.2.1. Anyhow... here's the scoop on me.
:)
I had an Athlon 1.x Ghz up until last December with all the bells and whistles a gamer could reasonably want. XP Home started freaking out on me and after a while and many calls to Microsoft I basically determined it was beyond repair for me. I've been using computers and building my own since probably 94-95 or so so I should've been able to fix anything reasonable. I'm pretty sure ultimately it was a hardware problem but I was fed up with Windows anyhow so I just sold the whole thing except the motherboard/processor (everything else worked fine).
No more computer for me I said.
Then I saw the iMac. It had style. Maybe person X doesn't like it because it looks like a lamp or a funny hat or whatever, but it's certainly unique and has some style. And I knew it had Unix underneath that pretty screen. I had tried various releases of Linux but it seemed like after the many days of tweaking would ultimately end in me booting into Windows anyway. No point in that. But the iMac came with Unix (BSD, Darwin, whatever you wanna call it, that's not the point) installed on it.
So I bought it. And it arrived. I took it outta the box and was even more impressed with the real thing. Within minutes I was literally up and online and everything worked. I really was amazed.
The above is mainly to establish that I used to use Windows, dabbled in Linux, and am recently a novice Mac freak. So now more onto the question at hand.
Of course all the iApps run well. Not a problem there. I have never ever ever ever ever had a coaster CD or DVD from this machine. This happened quite frequently with my PC. While burning a CD under Mac OS X I've been able to browse the internet, watch quicktime, etc no problem even. I *think* once I even played an OpenGL game to see if I could make it make a coaster. No dice though. This makes me happy. A coaster for a CD isn't that big a deal but coaster DVD's at $4-$5 a pop can stink.
Why do I have 768 MB of RAM in it? To run Windows 2000 with Virtual PC. Windows 2000 does run slow. It works but it runs slow. For my correspondence classes I'm taking right now I need to program in VC++ so I went and got Virtual PC. VC++ is the only thing I use Virtual PC for.
I recently purchased Macromedia Flash MX. Works like a charm. I don't notice it being slow in the least.
Exporting DVD's from iDVD can take a while. But I don't really have a comparison on the PC so that's probably not too helpful.
I've rendered some Bryce here and there and it doesn't take any longer than on my Athlon machine that I used to have. I won't say it's faster but I know it's not slower.
Games that my machine meets or exceeds the specs for work just like they did on the PC. The Mac does have games... you can get them from gogamer.com and adobe.com...
Encoding to MP3 doesn't take any longer. Converting movie files takes the same amount of time.
I dunno. Overall I'm impressed with OS X. It took me a while to realize that it wasn't the computer I was happy with but it was the OS that I was happy with. If you live close to an Apple store I'd reccommend checking them out for yourself or finding a friend that'll admit to having one.
As far as speed goes I think they're decently on par with x86 machines. They might be a tad slower. But unless every single day you're going to render video, does it really matter? All I usually do is browse the internet, download stuff, play the occasional game, IM, etc. If you want to play every new game that comes out I'd say get a PC because you can upgrade that easier long term I think. Or if you daily intend to do super intensive tasks. But for most users any small slowdown that a OS X does is worth the benefit of which in my opinion, is a better OS.
It's like I told my friend the other day... I might have a *insert crappy but dependable car name* and you might have a *insert fast but non-dependable car name*... but odds are, neither of us are gonna very much over highway speeds so who cares if you can go twice as fast as I am if you never will.
Ok, I'll admit that Mac OS X 10.1 was slow. 10.2 was a little faster, but 10.2.1 is ever faster to date.
I don't think that Mac OS X is slow... The problem is that Mac OS X appications are slow (especially IE).
PS> I have an 800 MHz iMac with 256MB of RAM.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Mod it "-1, Flamewar".
Honestly, this story is just screaming for people to say: "Yes it is" or "No it ain't".
"Is Mac OS X Slow?" Sorry...
Compared to what? Compared to what hardware? Compared to what OS? Heck, remember that there isn't even any other architecture people can run MacOS X on (thanks to Apple) to compare. So how do you want to separate if a) MacOS X is slow b) the hardware it runs on is slow or c) none of the above?
Just wondering.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
I have found it to be a bit slugish (compaired to OS 9) on my B&W G3.
But playing with it on a G4, I haven't noticed a decrease in speed.
I think that Apple focused there time on optimizing performance for G4's, especially with AGP graphics (Quartz Extreme) and didn't focus on G3's as much.
Hence iBooks and older (non-G4) iMacs being slow, and giving this wide conception that the OS is very slow.
G3's are the most available Macs right now (Libraries, Schools, etc.) because they were cheap, and very popular (iMac). As a result all these machines are the most likely test bed for those who don't on Macs.
I would like to know how people see XP on a Pentium II with 64MB RAM? Slugish?
Remember the original iMac didn't ship with much RAM... And a 233 MHz G3 processor. And there are a ton of those systems out there.
I had a G4/533 with a gig of RAM. General performance is just fine, non graphical applications like Apache, gzip, etc would have performance up to par with the same software on any other OS and/or platform.
... 1995.
... it doesn't anti-alias/scale/whatever, and it scrolls and resizes fast. Although this feature might not be needed if QE absolutely solves the above problems. But wait, my G4's Rage 128 pro wouldn't work with QE.
The main problem was the graphics rendering. I haven't tried Quartz Extreme, but on 10.1, things like scrolling in Mozilla (this includes Chimera) or IE were just sluggish. Scrolling a web page, in the Intel world, should only be sluggish if you're using a Pentium 100 with an non-accelerated graphics card.
Resizing a window in OSX has the same issues as scrolling. The last time a Windows or Linux user experienced sluggishness and frame skipping when resizing a simple file manager or browser window was like
I think what OSX needs is a means to bypassing the graphics pipeline for certain operations. One way I did this was by loading up IE for OS9 in OSX
The kind of UI sluggishness I describe is a really hard pill to swallow for a traditional PC user like me. I switched, but after a year ended up switching back. It's just like the time I bought an SGI, once I got over the fact that "wow, I own an SGI workstation!", it quickly became a cool purple doorstop. Once you get over having "real" transparent terminals, all you're left with is a slow user interface. Maybe OSX is a couple years ahead of its time?
On a 500 MHz G3 with an 8 meg Rage 128 I find the lag is almost all about the graphics card and, as it's a laptop, I can't upgrade it.
I actually find using OS X to be faster than, because it can do more than one thing at a time. No more sit-there-while-Mozilla-loads. Now I can switch to something else while those big pages load.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
1) if you open a shell and start ripping or gzipping or compiling, it's plenty fast enough. Building programs from source archives (via Fink) is plenty fast. The window manager is superfast. Most everything is fast enough that I don't get hung up on its speed.
2) Once you use up free memory with a bunch of open apps and start swapping, performance degrades a bit, but it's still useable. this is pretty similar to X/Linux behaviour. However, there are a lot of huge heavyweight apps on OS X, so using up free memory can happen. I usually have Mail, OmniWeb, SSH-Agent, Stickies, Terminal and iTunes open even before i've started "working". If I add in Photoshop, Illustrator 10, and Preview, i'm on the edge.
3) There are a couple of gawdawfully slow applications out there. apple's iCal calendar program is beautifully designed but it's drastically slower than any of the other apple iApps! I think it must be written in visual basic or something. This is not the OS's fault, but it sure behooves Apple to fix this sort of problem because it reflects poorly on them. The apple address book is also kinda slow, and the new iSync public beta is way too slow. (hopefully they'll address that in the final release.) MS Office X is ultra-slow and a piece of crap to boot! Fortunately i can revert to running Office 98 in os 9 emulation, which is both faster and, frankly, better designed and more useful software.
4) Windows has always put a premium on a quick UI, and it's one of the things they've done right in the past; but i have a Sony Vaio running Windows XP (Xcrement-Polish) with the same amount of memory as my mac and a "faster" processor, and it's a slow puppy. Slow to open a folder, slow to launch an app, slow to shut down, slow to connect to the network. Slow all over, in fact. The original poster of this thread admitted that he had to go in and hotrod XP in order to get decent performance out of it. that's comparing apples to lemons. out of the box, OS X is faster.
Laf, I already got modded down. I didn't realize Janie was a fan of /.
Live web cams
I haven't dismissed OS X yet. When it's matured as much as Windows 2K has, then I think it will really shine.
I have a 900MHz PowerPC, running MacOS X "Jaguar." I am a programmer, but I have not developed anything for OS X, so I can only offer my opinion as a user.
Is the OS slow? I think it depends on what aspect you're talking about. Overall, I have to say, no, it's not a slow OS.
At times, the GUI seems a little sluggish. Windows don't always pop as rapidly as one might be accustomed to on a comparable PC running NT/200/XP. I understand that Quartz can be pretty demanding of CPU and graphics processor time (or at least the latter).
I browse occasionally from this box, and it is my subjective opinion that network performance may not be the swiftest. However, I haven't studiously timed anything, and I haven't taken into account the network it is attached to (like eliminating the long wire run I did, the cheap hub it's plugged into, and attaching it directly to my broadband modem). This subjective impression may also be influenced by vague memories of some posts to Macintouch.com concerning sluggish network performance.
I run strictly audio apps on my Mac. It's easily apparent to me that the audio facilities of MacOS X are anything BUT slow. More like "jaw-dropping." My main app is eMagic Logic 5, and it is astounding what it can do. The amount of data that it can process in realtime - at least some of it courtesy of OS X Core Audio functionality - is amazing. If OS X was a slug in all departments, we wouldn't be enjoying such incredible performance. It's clear to me that the process-handling facilities of OS X (scheduler, etc) and the audio libraries are definitely up to par, at least inasmuch as they don't get in the way of the PowerPC and its Altivec.
Looking forward to reading other responses to this topic.
It's slower than OS 9, but it's not enough to make it evil.
I have an older 450Mhz blue and white G3 which is a long ways from the new machines but i have no problems with using OS X, 10.2 that is.
10.1 is excellent, anything before that, forget it!
It's slower than hell on a 500Mhz ibook with 320m of RAM. I love 9.2 much better. When I want Linux I use my Suse 8 box, fast as hell on a 300Mhz Dell with just 192m of RAM. Plus it's much more stable.
Every time I post a question about clustering, I get a fury of posts about how I should "imagine a beowulf cluster of these". Sould I take this personally? Are these posters doubting my ability to visualize clustering technology? And what do Natalie Pr0tman and hot grits have to do with anything?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I am super-happy with the speed of my 800MHz Flatscreen iMac running OS X 10.2 ("Jaguar"). Even 10.1 was acceptable, but the video card acceleration in this "Quartz Extreme" thingie is *great*.
At work, I've found a few things, like printing to printers with complex PPDs, are slower than they should be ( PPDs seems to be parsed every time, not cached as in OS 9, say ), but what I always tell people about OS X is "it's worth the price if only because you never have to worry about rebooting just because some crappy Microsoft application crashes".
Anecdotally, I've run a few source-compatable command-line apps on both a PPC533Mhz Mac and an AthalonXP2400... surprise surprise, the Athalon seems a bit faster in that case, but (a) wouldn't you expect that and (b) you're probably concerned about the speed of GUI apps, huh? They were certainly not *half* as fast, which is what you might expect. iMovie is faster on Mac hardware in any case
Like the man says, the slow things all seem to be app-related ( use Mozilla not I.E, etc ). It's plenty fast. Whiners are using Classic apps... and even those are generally quite tolerable in performance, though I do avoid launching Classic ( as in I *never* do ). I'm not sure I'd want to run it on a non-Quartz graphics card or a slower G3, but... that's not what you're talking about.
The one OS X app that is really slower than it should be is VirtualPC... let's hope Connectix will get it's act together in a few revisions... but I don't use PC apps anyway...
So what if it's slow? It's a new OS and you should buy a new computer for it. Why would anyone buy new hardware if everything works okay on there old machine? It just wouldn't make sense. I think Apple made a good decision on this one, although I'm not a fan.
Since I was buying a cluster my criteria was not single processor speed but speed per dollar what i found was mildy surprising. For programs that could take advatage of the altivec chip inside the G4, the mac was about a factor of 2 cheaper per run time than the P4 and athalons. On the otherhand with the Altivec turned off the mac was about a factor of 2 more expensive per run time. I note that this was not done on code optimised for the altivec but was just generic fortran passed through an automatic vector pre-processor program for compile time optimization.
Of all the processors I tested, P3, p4, athalon, the P4 had the wildest variations in benchmarking. that is all the other proceesors seemed to have constant scaling factors in speed as the applications varied. but the p4 variev by over a factor of 3 from the others both faster and slower. I assume this has something to do with the very long pipeline, and the hyper threading, and the size of the caches. But even taking these into account I found it highly unpredictable which applications would run faster or slower (that is ones that might logically have more cache misses did not neccessary degrade)
. In the end I decided the P3 has the most bang for the buck , though falling cpu prices might shift that conclusion to the athalon. The problem I encountered with the athalon was a higher down time for the cluster units due to thermal faliure., so thats a hidden cost. The apples NEVER failed in any thermal tests so thats a hidden plus.
Now this analysis does not factor in other things like Graphics speed other factors more important to users than sceintific apps. However when I compare my molecular visualization grpahics before and after the release of 10.2 I have to say the mac is insanely fast for graphics now wheere before it was intolerably slow.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I've found Finder to be quicker in some cases, but not in others. I've moved a large number of files similar to how you describe and my milage really has varried. I've moved files across a network to an SMB share (Windows filesharing, that is) faster with MacOS X than with 98 or 2K, but operations on the local machine sometimes take longer on OS X than on 98 or 2K. It's so variable.
For the most part, I've found Apple's time estimate to finish some file operation to be pretty good while Microsoft is notorious for having 'about five seconds left' for several minutes.
... "I read part of it all the way through." -- Movie Mogul Sam Goldwyn (and some slashdot readers)
I'm running 10.1 on my Powerbook G3/400 (Lombard), and it runs fine. A co-worker with the same model Powerbook has 10.2 and praised the overall performance boost it gave his system.
For comparison, 10.1 is much faster than the Debian installation I had on the same system.
Details for the terminally bored: Linux was slow enough that I rarely bothered to boot into it. FWIW, I've heard that the Linux performance issues were largely X and/or driver related. I've used and enjoyed Linux systems at work and at home, but this experience was at best a 'D-' on Linux's platform support report card, IMO.
Yeah. Notice the multitude of Apple related topics? Someone's got a major stiffy for Apple here, possibly even a paid-for stiffy.
For the record: a clean install of OS 9 has the illusion (note my word choice) of being about twice to three times the speed of Mac OS X if you have been in OS X for a length of time. This is true pretty much regardless of what machine you are installing on. On the other hand, it also has about the architectural maturity of Windows 3.1, and if you start installing a ton of extensions, its speed starts going down the tube. This is why you see OS 9 as slow and others see it as fast.
Has anyone seen the new accessibility feature for users with visual impairment? The OS will magnify, on the fly, any part of the screen up to something like 24x... fully anti-aliased. The magnification follows the mouse pointer, and as you move it around the screen there is no hesitancy at all.
Thanks to how it's implemented, using command-tab to switch applications is almost useless because the system flashes the Dock icons too quickly to see what program is next. And don't forget the always-fun demo of clicking 5 or 6 dock icons in quick succession, only to watch all the programs launch and draw their interfaces simultaneously in just a few seconds.
I don't think there is anything in the OS that slows down its responsiveness to the user. If someone wants to get into the power of the hardware -- running benchmarks and such -- that's a whole other argument. But it has little to do with "MacOS is slow".
don't know about Mac OS X
:))
:]
but Mozilla is event faster then WinXP IE6 on my winXP machine
maybe a little longer to load but it worth the waiting
Since my iBook2 (600MHz) can't handle the new Quartz rendering in Jaguar, I'm left with a functional - but still slowish - interface under OS X.
In general, though, I get the best of both worlds by running Mac-on-linux, which runs OS X beautifully (all except sound....) with a simple Ctrl-Alt-F8...
Scott
This is the second flamebait ask slashdot in as many days. Just like the "OSS or commercial more expensive?" thing from yesterday, this is way too generic a question.
What do we have for tomorrow's ask slashdot? Better color: red or blue?
Yes, I find the UI slow. Things have improved somewhat, but when I was running 10.1 on a 450MHz G3, I could run XDarwin, ssh to my Linux box and run KDE remotely across the LAN, and everything except moving windows around seemed quicker in KDE across the network than on OSX locally.
Mac OS 9 on the same hardware certainly felt MUCH faster than OSX. In fact, OS9 apps running in Classic often felt faster than native apps.
I've since upgraded to a 700MHz G4 and 10.2.1, and it still feels kinda slow, although it's not as bad. I have Terminal.app set to use transparent windows and anti-aliased fonts, which does slow it down, but should I get a spinning beach ball when typing "ls"? Sometimes I do.
That said, the raw hardware is impressive. I can rip a CD to MP3s in about as much time as it takes to play the first track (which it does while ripping). Before RC5-64 completed (and yes I know the README says not to use it as a benchmark) I compared my dual PIII/450 to my single G4/700. The G4 was completing blocks at about 2.5x the speed of the PC (running Linux 2.4).
Anyone have any suggestions for speeding up the UI?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Buy a Mac. Run some apps. Install Yellow Dog on it. Run some apps.
Buy a Mac. Spend the exact same amount of money on the best PC you can get. Run some apps on the Mac. Run some apps on the PC under your favorite operating system.
Personally, I think #2 is perfectly fair, since Apple stopped allowing clones to license the OS for third-party hardware, and I think #2 is what most people are complaining about WRT speed. I doubt that most people get to the second half of #1 -- if you're buying Mac hardware, you're doing it to run Mac software.
Granted it only has 512mb of ram,, but this thing (Running 10.2, G4 400, blah blah) is afflicted with the dreaded "Spinning Beach Ball of Death".
Lets check google..
Ahh, here is one:
Sour Apples
Everyone is talking about it. Check google groups for discussions among DV and print people.
I spend more time here at work waiting for typing to catch up to those words being rendered on my screen, patches of my web browser window being blank, only to show up again when my cursor goes over the area. When I right click a file to choose "open with" I wait a a good 15-25 seconds for the highlighted area to get past the "Open" dialogue. It just sticks there. If I try and do something smart like hit a key, I go into "Spinning Beach Ball" mode. Not a very fun place to be.
So all in all, while I like some aspects of OS X, I spend the day at work *craving* getting home to use my redhat machine.
I know I am gonna hear: get more ram. which is true, but still, 512mb is fine on all my intel/amd based machines. I know the Apple demographic is all white, rich and owns 2.5 SUV's (that match their two wonderful white children!!), but dog slow with 512mb is just simply insane.
I've been using OS X on a G4/450 (dual processor) since it came out. The first couple of versions were slow. For example, iTunes encoded at 1-2x in 10.0. Now, under 10.2, it rips/encodes at 12-14x.
I've never used an OS with such good multitasking. I can have LimeWire downloading, an iMovie rendering, and responsive web browsing all at the same time (granted, I do have 704MB of RAM).
With 10.2, application speed and overall performance is great, but it still gives an impression of slowness. Little things like brief delays before a window opens or closes do a lot to make the machine seem slow.
My G4 perked up a lot after upgrading to 10.2, but nowhere near as much as the Dual 1 GHz G4 we have at the office. Its video card is supported by Quartz Extreme; my old Rage 128 isn't.
I think people feel OS X is slow because of the GUI. most code executes quickly, esp command line stuff and photoshop. But the click and the machine jumps feel just isn't there. You get used to it.
I love OSX, but on my 450MHz G4, it is quite annoying to use in comparison to OS9. I don't think older Mac users want to bash the OS, but want more of a reason to stay away from the DarkSide. OS9 felt very snappy to use, while X does not, at least on older hardware. Rendering and what not may be the same if not better (AfterFX : FCP3); most time on a system is spent navigating it! I also agree that OSX is MUCH more stable, but so was OS/2. Don't see a Warp Switch campaign! I hope not to bash, but let Apple know what we want... I never remember any complaints about OS9 being almost unusable coming from OS8.5. I agree that a lot of switchers are too quick to call foul, but keep in mind that they are seeing Macintosh with new eyes. I think that they should not be ignored. I for one have had my Mac blinders on for quite some time. For the record... M$ is the enemy! Not alternative OS's :-)
..still saving up for a sig..
OS X seems slower than any other OS for many things. It is slower for some things. It is faster for others.
If you use Mac OS 9 in a single computer home environment with a decent amount of RAM and then switch to OS X you will almost certainly notice a slow down. That is what almost all of the complaints are about. OS X needs much more RAM than OS 9. Once it has it the speed difference becomes smaller.
If you are in a multimachine environment running servers in the background all the time on OS 9 then OS X will actually provide a speed boost if it has enough memory. I've got the lowest end certified OS X hardware available (beige G3 233). It was an absolutely dog on OS 9 and there was nothing we could do to fix it. It was sharing files on the LAN and running a webserver just for testing pages. It crashed all the time and drug when it was up. OS X actually improved the performance of this machine.
Another thing besides RAM to watch for is HD speed. OS X seems much more sensitive to HD speed (or maybe the CPU speed : HD speed ratio just is getting much worse). We have identical iBooks here that only differ by hard drive. The original Toshiba 10gig machines seem almost unusably slow but the ones with IBM drives and larger drives are much more useable (I'm using one now).
OS X is the slowest OS going in resizing a window. That's about it for definite speed losses.
Oh, and Quartz Extreme doesn't speed up day to day graphics much. It speeds up the compositing of windows. Calculating a new window is not accelerated, only the calculation of the layering of Windows is. Most benchmarks actually show no speed improvement with Quart Extreme. See the Schiller keynote on QuickTime for examples of where it really speeds things (rendering overlaid movies with tranparent windows in from).
OS 10.2 runs fine on the old blue and white with a 500 mhz G4, and half a gig ram.
Hell, Windows XP runs smoother under OS 10.2 and a G4 500 mhz than my 700 mhz intel chip.
Yes. Every OS is slow. OS 9, OS X, Linux, Windows XP.
Until the things I want to do happen instantaneously, all are slow. With the computing power we have at our disposal, things should not be weighing down the CPU at all. My Apple IIgs can do some things faster than my new P4!
Frankly, the most responsive OSes I have ever used have been BeOS and windows 95(IE removed), on a P4 1.8.
At work I use os X 10.5 and it gets SCHOOLED by my P3 800 at home; when I installed 10.2, I noticed a huge speed up, but some apps didn't work with it so I had to go back.
Still, BeOS is the fastest os I have ever used.
I don't want to admit to how many of the damn things I have, but I have a 450 g4 that runs a protools rig and it never boots into x. I forced myself to use x on all my other machines, imac's and ibook's since the beta, and I can tell you that os9 is much faster in everything from finder tasks to scrolling. But keep this in mind... all that "speed" does not make up for the crashing you get even on a finely tuned os9 box.
On my G4-867, things could be faster sometimes, but mostly this seems to be apps, and not the OS. I'm hoping this will improve.
But when it comes to any floating-point stuff (what I got it for in the first place), like Photoshop filters, Final Cut filters, color compisiting etc., it blazes through it like a hot knife through butter, comared to an Intel box.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Since there aren't any good benchmarks for this sort of thing, all you're going to get are subjective comments. As someone who has used Mac OS 9, OS X, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 on a variety of machines, I'm pleased with X's performance.
One thing I did notice when I switched from Mac OS 9 to OS X--the Aqua GUI feels a bit slow. I don't know what causes this perception, but you'll hear users on Mac-centric discussion forums complaining about the lack of "snappiness." In OS 9's Finder (in list view), you could select a hundred files and immediately drag them into another folder. In OS X's Finder (in column view) you have to wait a second after selecting the files or you can't drag them. It's little things like that which matter.
On the other hand, OS X is much better for multitasking. I leave all the apps I commonly use running 24/7. OS 9's primitive memory management made this near impossible, and its pathetic system of assigning processor time to the frontmost application prevented me from even simple multitasking (like coding a Web page while downloading software while listening to an MP3).
I'm running OS X on a 733Mhz PowerMac G4 (digital audio) with 1024 MB RAM and a GeForce 3.
But OpenBSD 3.2 is rather speedy on my TiBook. Some problems in the support (not very popular OS, on a not very popular machine) but they are being improved. http://www.theapt.org/openbsd/tibook.html
Of course, when I was using older versions of Mandrake (or Caldera) on my PII, they ran faster, so I may just need to optimize the OS or go with a more streamlined window manager.
My roomates have a new WinXP machine, but while it seems a little faster than my Win98 PII, it doesn't seem all that fast to me. Maybe because they've loaded all this sleazeware that stays in memory to spy on them and pop-up ads when they go to Web sites. Mmmm... sleazeware...
All in all, I'd say that my TiBook runs fairly quickly. There are probably ways to optimize it so that I can get even better performance out of it, but I want to upgrade to Jaguar before I try them. (Of course, I'd rather figure out how to use the IR port on it to make it into a big universal remote... but that seems to be out of reach.)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I am using a Powerbook G4 550Mhz running Mac OS X 10.2.1.
I moved from an Athlon 1.33GHz Desktop running RedHat 7.3 with Ximian Desktop, and I also use a IBM Thinkpad T21 running Windows 2000 for work.
the only slowness I seem to notice in my daily usage (email, web surfing, some documents, photo printing) is the load times, and I attribute this to my 4200 RPM hard disk.
Evolution took a while to load on my 1.33Ghz with a 7200RPM Disk drive too. And my Thinkpad is equally doggy.
I don't ever find myself switching off my Powerbook for my thinkpad to do something because of speed. They sit side by side on my desk. The powerbook is in the center.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
OS 9 was slow compared to macOS 10 on a 366 G3? Are you serious? Your MacOS 9 was seriously screwed up. I've used macOS 9 on everything down to a 75Mhz Performa. I think it would take a 200Mhz PPC 603e before the speed of MacOS 10 on a 366G3 would catch up to the speed of MacOS 9. Esp. with that amount of ram.
What is the bottleneck between a human sitting down in front of a computer and what he ultimately wants to do?
The human interface!
I find a cheap PC running either Windows or Linux to be more expensive than my Macintosh.
time = money
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Along these lines, some people can put up with a much more sluggish UI - thus the "I run OS X on my Mac Classic and it runs fine!" posts. And on the other end of the spectrum, anything less than instantaneous is unacceptable to some people. Again, I think allegiance one way or another can play a part in this.
That said, my own personal opinion is that it's fast enough for me. I run it on a G4 733 MHz tower and a 600 MHz iBook. In general, speed is such a non-issue that I never think about it. I have plenty of things on my wishlist for OS X to improve, and while speed is there, it's not terribly high. I don't find myself ever frustrated by a lack of speed with anything. I use iMovie, iDVD, XDarwin, Mozilla/Chimera, Quicken, iTunes, Terminal, and plenty more pretty extensively. Again, take my hardware, OS version (Jaguar) and personal biases (like Mac, OS X) into account.
Even so, lately the iBook has been taking several seconds to login, where it used to be about 2 seconds when we first got it. Not sure why, but cleaning out ~/Library always seems to help. If not that, then it's probably something in /System or /Library. I'm not too thrilled that OS X seems to exhibit its own version of "registry rot," slowing down over time. I'd like to say that sort of problem only afflicts MS users but it's not my experience with OS X. Hopefully they're working hard on fixing and optimizing this stuff - and before it gets to a point where I do think it's too slow!
Say hello to zMac.
I've been using it on PowerBooks and iMac DV 400s since the day it came out.
At first it was slow, but stable.
10.1 was alot better, I installed that on a 466 Beige G3 upgraded minitower and a 266 All-In-One. Worked fine, rock solid OS X Server 10.1 on the AIO.
10.2 is great on our iMac DV 400, my iMac 800 and my PowerBook 550 and it runs great as a server on the AIO 266.
Some times the wheel comes up, but for an OS that needs rebooting once every 20 days and switched between a wired and wireless network 3-5 times a day, I'll accept the wheel.
Keeping Terminal open gives one the chance to kill an offending app that is slowing everything down.
Of course I think Mozilla is bloatware, but that's me.
Amen to that. Chimera is the Galeon of OS X. (If you're tired of waiting for Mozilla, but like the rendering engine, try one of these...you'll never go back.)
moto411.com
The reason I've always liked Windows for desktop use is because the mouse never jerks around when doing multiple tasks like on X windows, and things load faster (IE loads in no time, where konqueror takes a while).
::waits for windows flame replies::
It gives me the feeling like I'm in control.
I recently used a dual 1ghz G4 that couldn't play an mpeg video in full screen without chopping. The Quicktime technology sucks.
Anyone know why OS X, X11, Mac OS 9, etc. Seem to respond way slower than Windows?
In my experience, there is only one "true" metric that means anything for system speed and that is response time. I define response time as the elapsed time between the time the user issues a command and the time that the command has completed execution. For most people, this translates into the time between when something is mouse-clicked and the time the associated item opens/closes or similar actions.
All other things being relatively equal, I have found Mac OS X (both Jaguar and 10.1.5) to be very responsive. I'm running a TiBook (800 MHz) with 512 Mb RAM and have no complaints whatsoever. In fact, I've found that my productivity has greatly increased (about 25%) since I made my TiBook my primary computer. The standard issue machine at my office is a laptop with an 850 Mhz Mobile P3 processor and 512 Mb RAM running Win98 SE. In the response-time test, the TiBook wins handily.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I have several computers at work. I recently adopted a Blue G3 350 MHz with 512 MB RAM. I installed OS X on this machine. My primary machine is a 300 MHz Pentium 2 with 256 MB RAM.. this one runs Windows XP.
I tried using the OS X machine as my primary computer. I really wanted to. After a couple of days, however, the abject slowness of this computer with OS X was totally unbearable. Windows XP on a 300 MHz Pentium 2 is useable.. some applications may be slow, but the OS is FAR more responsive than OS X on the G3. Web browsing is an order of magnitude faster on the XP machine as well.
...Mac OS X is slow. Or perhaps I should say that Darwin is slow. Or more correctly, I should say that the G4 800 I have is slower than the PIII's I have.
I regularly do Java and Python development, and I run the same scripts and programs on my Mac and on my Pentium III, 500's (running Linux).
With few exceptions, the programs (which are all console-based, BTW, so it has nothing to do with graphics) are always faster on the PIII. Sometimes faster by twice or three times.
While I agree you can't compare megahertz like people do, I don't think the G4 is as fast as Apple says. If it was as fast, why would Apple be offering dual G4's as the standard for their desktops? Why wouldn't they publicize Darwin on Intel vs. Darwin on PPC results?
Having said this, though, I wouldn't trade my mac for an Intel box any day. I love OS X. So it's not as fast for scripts and programs. It is perfectly usable and fast. The graphics are snappy on my laptop (the top of the line 800MHz until this week). I don't notice any speed problems except for repetitive tasks using Python (for example, inserting millions of calculated rows into Postgres). When I encode sorensen or mp4 video speed would be nicer as well.
I love my Mac. It's been a long time since I loved my laptop the way I do this one. Do I wish it were faster? Not for daily use. My Dell sits on my desk unused while my Apple gets used every day.
There are a few things that I do to enhance my OS X experience. I work in Linux systems deployment for a software firm, and spend mucho time at the command line. I *do* think that the Apple Terminal application is a bit slow, so I use Eterm under XDarwin/Gnome for my terminal needs. My other suggestion is installing Launchbar. This program makes every command/application/document/etc. available by typing a few characters. It's highly configurable and allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard for just about every task.
These tools, plus the multitasking ability (versus OS 9's inability) allow me to be more efficient on OS X. Speed doesn't really matter as much, since I can still get my work done.
Oh, and here's a nifty screenshot that illustrates that productivity :)
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
The SystemStarter is brilliant. Along with the start up scripts for various daemons and so on, you list what service it provides and what services it needs started before you start it. The SystemStarter works out a partial order of running these scripts and then does as many as possible in parallel. This gives it the fasted start up of any Unix I've used.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Titanium PowerBook, I don't find Mac OS X slow
...
at all.
Yeah, Rrrriggght.
It's no sluggy under Debian 3.0+, too !
Now explain to me why the display is "swimming"
- Toon Moene.
I am running eMac, G4 750 MHz with 768 MB RAM. Its slow. I have freebsd installed on a Pentium 233 MHz with 32 MB RAM and it smokes OS X for interactive speed. But the slowness isn't overall and for everything. For example I can do video editing which works great but resizing my web browser seems sluggish. Rippin' CDs is really fast but opening a tcsh windows seems sluggish. Its wierd.
I've never noticed more than a two-second ( if that ) pause when opening an OS X terminal, what the heck are you talking about? Was this a 256Mb bare-bones 700Mhz model with Word running which had never before launched Terminal? Something in a store display perhaps?
Look, I don't want to sound like some Mac freak, I'm the first to point out slow where slow is ( Apple needs to bust with the DDR RAM in these iMacs, *really* ), but somebody MOD DOWN the parent post here, they're clearly just in love with WinXP, paid by MS, something
- the data presented is just *wrong*.
Apple doesn't care very much about European customers. So it's quite hard here to find any store in your neighborhood at all you can have a look at MacOS X in.
(Let alone pricing outside the US, which is just horrible)
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
I thought that XFree was slow when I first tried it, but that was before "Jaguar" or 10.2 came out. Since I upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2 everything seems much snappier now, including XFree. 10.1 may have had a lot of debugging code in it that was removed from Jaguar.
Binary installation was painless, thanks to the install wizard, or whatever Apple calls it.
It installed the binaries in /usr/X11R6 and contained all the default programs as one would expect.
Xfree on OSX has two modes, full screen and rootless. If you want to use Gnome, then run fullscreen and task swap between X-Window and Aqua. If you want you can run in "rootless" mode, in which the root window is the Aqua desktop. This is quite nice, as it lets you run X-Window clients along side Aqua applications.
X-Window applications will still need a window manager to run, and the defaut is twm. There are other window managers out there, but the one I like the best so far is Orobor OSX, which looks like the regular Aqua window decorations. Orobor OSX will automatically start the X server for you and run as the window manager in one easy click.
Update your .login with
setenv DISPLAY :0
and you can run X applications from your regular Terminal.app program. This is quite nice, because you can use Apple-C and Apple-V for cutting and pasting. This is very useful to know, because I can never remember the keyboard shortcuts to emulate a three button mouse. Having one mouse button is an annoyance sometimes, that is my only problem.
Overall, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars. With XFree running on OS X I truly have the best of both worlds; a user-friendly desktop and the power of UNIX.
Cheers to Apple Computer.
P.S. one off-topic complaint about Apple:
Dear Apple Developers! Please fix IOPCCardFamily!
My wife's work has a hundred or so G3s that need wireless access, but OS X cannot see the PCI-PCMCIA bridge that is needed put a wireless card in these older machines.
Thank you and good day.
For something like an office app, on similar machines, it takes forever to even start on any Windows machine I've used. I haven't used an 8 way xeon though, but my dual athlon is notably annoying.
Linux flys, but there is usually not a lot of extra junk running in the background. I usually use it with simpler WMs and I don't have things doing live updates in 20 windows.
A 500Mhz iBook is quite adequate (I'm using one now), but there is a slight delay when launching things (the dock bounce), but it is far less than windows (even things like Microsoft Word). OS X has a bunch of things in the background, but most are sleeping, but I've noticed that some things seem to have memory leaks or seem to want to update every three seconds and these will cause things to slow down.
LinuxPPC seems a bit faster, but again, I have far fewer things running, and am often in console mode. Mozilla takes a while to launch regardless of platform.
So OS X and Macs are comparably fast, if you compare similar systems. Comparing very old powerbooks to 133Mhz pentium systems is fair, but not an old powerbook to a new laptop.
My dual 1.2Ghz athlon is comparable to my dual 800Mhz G4. V.S. OS X, the Athlon is faster under linux, much slower under windows, but it depends what I run. Linux has mostly smaller applications, but Cocoa applications seem to work well. Huge applications like Mozilla or large carbon apps tend to be slow.
Under Jaguar, I rarely get the beachball of interminable delay, and even then I can switch apps to something I can do. Linux normally lets me do this too, but Windows won't let me switch apps until it thinks I should (so I am often stuck for a while). So subjectively, OS X is similar to Linux.
My observation is that the comments about X being slow are really related to OS X being slower than, usually, OS 9 on the same hardware. This is, of course, true but it is a lot like saying that Winders NT/2000/XP is slow when compared to Win95 on the same hardware. Unfortunately, features aren't free.
I'm running OS X (10.1.5) on my old 9600/200 (yes, not a G3/G4, thanks xpostfacto!) and it is still bearable, maybe not fast in any respect, but it still does what I want it to.
just my two cent.
-isolenz
This is an important issue and I have been using macs since 1985. I have spent a lot of time trying to deal with X and it leaves much to be desired with regards to the user experience. In OS 9 and prior, you could butt up against the edges of the OS and it would not fail horribly. There was graceful failure. Not so yet in X. This leaves a bad taste in one's mouth when combined with the "perceived performance". In OS 7, there was a tenant of "percieved stability", ie the OS may not be stable but it must feel like it is. Well, OS X DOES have a perceived performance problem. Especially on G3 machines and those without enough ram or video ram. I feel that the messaging layer from the GUI to the underlying code is the problem here as Apple uses Perl to do the messaging. Hell, I write code in Director that is asynchronous and faster than Apple's OS X GUI. The finder is particularly bad here but the overall effect is that there feels like there is a layer of Molassas under the GUI. It feels sluggish and even if the code under OS X is fast as hell, the perception is that the GUI is not and the whole system is not. I have 10.2.1 on my G4 cube and two of my G3's but I almost never boot to it since OS 9 is just plain faster and the GUI feels better and doesn't punish me if I do something I should not. Lots of my associates love the unix under OS X and the GUI but I dislike the feel of unix and therefore it does not matter to me (cept with less crashes) for the most part.
A perl compiler would probably help to speed up the GUI on a per application basis but the facts are that you need a new ish video card for Quartz extreme, 512 meg of ram minimum and an 800 MHZ G4 for what I would consider to be percieved performance on par with OS 9 on my g3 500 laptop.
Even if it is not really slow, it sure feels slow. Slow enough to keep me in OS 9 for some time.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I use OS X on a PowerBook G4 550. I can second that statement about Terminal.app's text smoothing being slooooow but I don't experience a wait time to get a prompt even with text smoothing on. with text smoothing on, if I just do an "ls -al" there would be a pause and then the folder contents would display slowly and as meantioned before, "choppy". I turned off smoothing and Terminal.app is fine. type "ls -al" and the contents spit right back out on the terminal.
If it took 30 seconds to get a terminal window something else had to be going on in the backround at the time. the only time I saw something like that I was compiling some software, ripping an audio CD, downloading some stuff and someone was copying some crap via FTP from my laptop.
--
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
I'm a mac user and I admit that OS X can be slow at times. Then again, my 366Mhz iBook hardly compares to machines made in recent years. All I know is that it's certainly a more pleasent experience than Windows2000 on my 375Mhz Celeron.
It's it a bitch when you login to W2k, and click on the start menu to launch a program, only to have the desktop flicker and the start button reset while I'm in the middle of navigating through the menus. Silly me for expecting the start menu to be usable when I see it. I'll just have to sit here and wait until the hard drive activity dies down before I try to use my desktop, lest windows takes away that menu I was using.
OS X may be slow at times, but at least it doesn't frustrate you with it's slowness like windows does. There is none of this "here's the start menu, NO WAIT, HERE IT IS, no wait, try again" shit.
When OS X is working on something, it changes the cursor to the spinning beach ball, and I know to chill out and wait. Who knows with windows. I have three possible cursors (standard arrow, arrow with hourglass, and just hourglass) that may or may not indicate that the system is working on something. My traditional UNIX systems are even worse in this respect. The only visual clue the GUI will give me when the system is busy working on something is when I open up something like 'top'
384 MB of RAM and your system is suddenly "marginal".
Fucking lame.
Let me lead off by stating that I'm running OS X 10.2.2 (Jaguar) on my iBook, and 10.1.5 on my G4 Cube. The reason I haven't yet upgraded the Cube has to do with making sure all the core apps on the Cube are up-to-date so they'll work with Jaguar, and making sure there are no other "gotchas" in Jaguar. (Also, I need to free up more hard disk space on the Cube, since Jaguar eats more disk space.)
/usr/local/bin and having to recompile tinyfugue were both minorly annoying. But the speed improvement, and the ability to browse SMB shares easily, were worth it. My iBook is now a very usable OS X machine, and it's only a 500 MHz G3 machine.
OS X has gotten steadily better, to the point where I never boot my iBook back into OS 9 anymore. I've noticed a few annoyances when upgrading from 10.1.5 to 10.2.X on my iBook -- having to fix my PATH to once again include
My G4 Cube is a workhorse. It sometimes is a little slow to load applications, but once running, they don't seem to drag much at all. (Those who remember NeXTStep may recall that application load times sucked there too.)
One of the few application performance complaints that I have is with (surprise, surprise) Internet Explorer. Even after installing the latest 5.2.2 update, I've noticed painfully slow page render times on some sites. I've also noticed bad/wrong rendering (stuff that Netscape gets right, and that IE on Windows usually gets right). But then, IE on OS X has had numerous bugs from day one, including lack of support for long filenames (a problem shared with Microsoft Office v.X), occasional corruption of JPEG and other image files when saved to the local hard disk from the browser, and font rendering glitches (especially in Jaguar).
Where OS X shines is in applications that are written for the Cocoa framework, and in running Java applications. (Java applications run pretty quick under OS X, and look great to boot. Especially well written Swing apps.)
My one source of befuddlement: Load times and execution times for some "Classic" applications are even faster than the native versions of the same applications. (Well, assuming the Classic environment is already running.)
When i use it i expect to to be slow b/c of the eye candy, but it runs fine for me. Linux w/ flux on an athlon 1200 is faster than OSX on 400mhzG3s but its not bad.
PhysMem: 74.9M wired, 196M active, 223M inactive, 494M used, 146M free
VM: 3.10G + 70.9M 67260(0) pageins, 133662(0) pageouts
As always, I'm running a lot of stuff, including:
Classic
Photoshop
Mozilla
Mail
Ichat
Net Monitor
CPU Monitor
Launchbar
Slashdock
XDarwin
OroborOSX
I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
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Read: games...
I am always waiting for it to copy files.
I have two laptops, each purchased in the fall of 2000. The first is an Apple PowerBook ("Pismo" model) with a 400Mhz G3, 320MB of RAM and Mac OS X 10.2.1 (Jaguar). The other is a Dell Inspiron 5000e with a 750Mhz PIII, 256MB of RAM and Windows XP Pro (along with which-ever Linux distro I'm trying out at the time -- none have been good enough to stay permanently.) These are both decent systems -- definitely not new but not too terribly old.
Based on my use (I run MS Office, various web browsers, Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and Quicken on both machines), I see a clear difference in speed/performance: Mac OS X is definitely slower.
Web browsing brings the starkest contrast in performance. Be it via Mozilla, Opera, Chimera, IE, or Omni, navigating the Internet in Mac OS X is slower than in XP or Linux.
Mac OS X's Finder is also slower than its Windows and Linux counterparts. QuickTime's slower too. And games aren't even an option for me on the Apple, while I play Counter-Strike comfortably on the Dell.
I would like to say that my Apple hardware is just outdated, but it's no older than the Dell, so I can only chalk it up to the OS.
Apple made some dramatic improvements in user experience with Mac OS X, and I'll continue to use it over Mac OS 9 (and Windows for web development and graphics), but it is without a doubt slower than the competition.
I've used Windows boxes, UNIX workstations and PCs for years. I have the BARE minimum machine to support OS X--a 233 MHz G3 with 128 MB RAM. It works well. It's a little slower than OS9, but once I boosted my RAM to 192+, it picked up quite a bit (much less swapping with the disk). It's certainly tolerable for day to day tasks. I also run the Darwin SETI client in the background fulltime. The amazing thing is (in contrast with my experiences with other machines) is that the system is always responsive to the user. iTunes *never* skips no matter what other intensive task I throw at it. Furthermore, I think the animation simply gives the psychological perception of slowness where Windows and OS 9 menus and so forth snapped down. It does not take a huge amount of processing power to redraw a rectangle.
Given your atrocious spelling, I'm amazed to see you have a job at all.
You should at least know how to spell Athlon. I mean, damn...
I use a Beige G3 overclocked to 300MHz. Even overclocked it is very slow. At the stock speed (233MHz) it is unusable. I use Jaguar with a nice 40GB 7200RPM IBM drive, and 512MB of RAM. Using the builtin ATI Rage Pro video with 6MB of VRAM, Aqua makes this system crawl. I use the machine as a web/mail/file server and for those tasks is is quite fast. In fact, I bet it would run faster if I could disable the graphics entirely.
To show exactly how bad it is, I can open a terminal, make it full screen, cd to a full directory, and ls -la it. CPU utilization jumps to 100% and stays there while the list slowly scrolls by. I even used the hack to disable font antialiasing, but that provides no speed up. For terminal usage, it is faster for me to use Putty on my Windows box. The same directory listing via SSH, it *much* faster. So obviously the graphics system is the bottleneck in my system.
The solution to this would be to buy a decent video card, but you can't stick any old PCI VGA card in a Mac. First off the card needs a Mac boot ROM, then it needs to be supported by OS X, and you also need drivers. Of course "Mac Edition" ATI cards cost more than their PC counterparts, and the Radeon 7000 is the only modern ATI card available in PCI form. This all adds up to real frustration for OS X users stuck with older non-AGP Macs.
Overall I would recommend using OS X on a Beige G3 only if you intend to use it as a light duty server. For workstation or home use, you really have to have a modern Mac (~500MHz and up) to enjoy the user experience.
I never wait for it to copy files.
I bought an iBook with 128MB of ram. Holy crap, it was the slowest machine I think I've ever use. OS X is a *huge* memory pig. It takes like 320MB of ram with Mail.app and Chimera open. So with 128, it's just swapping all the time. The drive runs constantly. I bought a stick of 512MB from crucial.com, and now it's actually decent. I wouldn't say it's blazingly fast, but it's very usable now. Seems faster than my old Sony PIII 550 laptop too.
I'm sure the G4's are much faster, but I didn't feel like dropping $2500 for a laptop at the time.
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A 867 Mhz G4 has the same Quake performance as a Pentium 2.6 GHz
I usually just think about fucking her. It works.
To be honest, the best OS i have ever seen is OS2 Warp. I remember on a little P90 I was able to run SMOOOTHLY 4 simultaneous I/O processess without one problem (writing to a floppy, reading a CDROM, printing, and running a program).
I have not played with OS X, but other then unix based system, I have never seen this repeated on a Windows platform! Why the heck is writing to a floppy such a big deal?
I work in the advertising industry and must say that Photoshop is _INCREDIBLY_ fast under OSX. Its amazing.
In fact, all Adobe products kick ass on OSX.
I have no issues with my 17" wide iMac. Its a dream come true.
I bought into the new OSX and went out and bought a DUAL 1GHZ fully loaded with 1.5GB RAM and everything else I could put in it. After selling it on eBay after a month of use, I went back to my PIII 866 and Windows ran so Much Faster. Things like openning applications and dragging the Windows around and resizing them were a lot faster on the PC. I will never buy into that Apple BS again.
It gets even worse when your off-screen drawing touches every pixel in your window. Apple encourages apps to do this, of course, by offering particularly gluttonous Aqua features like brushed-metal windows (Extreme has no way to ask the graphics hardware to chew on a full-window gradient, atop a texture, being rendered to an offscreen pixmap). Don't believe me? Fire up Quartz Debug (part of the developer tools; allows you to ask Quartz to highlight update rectangles before they're painted) and see for yourself.
I'm confident that Apple will continue to make improvements, but right now apps like iCal (which shouldn't be computationally intensive, but is all hopped up on Aqua) are miserably slow in screen updates.
When someone buys a new computer and says "I don't find it that slow," it means its a snail. There has been no concept of "fast" or "slow" on PCs for at least 4 years. For typical computing (inclidng bleeding edge 3-D games) there is no noticible difference between my K6-II 400 MHz and my P4 2.6 GHz. Sure, compile times may be faster, and multitasking smoother (fewer skips in MP3s while crunching numbers) but you rarely notice the difference. Even with Windows XP or Gnome.
First post!
Wait a minute...238 comments already? Stupid OS X!
... but there are some places where it sucks. For example, resize the browser window this text is in. Resize a finder window. On my computer (700 MHz eMac, crappy rendering card), you get a lag of half a second to initiate the resize, and then only about 5 frames per second updating. This problem is not completely system-wide, but it happens in many other apps (especially Carbon apps, but Chimera has the same problem).
File searches: locate takes half a second, Finder's find command takes half a minute. This might be excusable with searches for contents, but not for "files named lshort.pdf."
App launches: about average. It launches photoshop faster a PC of the same speed launches it, or launches GIMP for that matter. It doesn't launch simple apps as fast as Linux or Windows, but the half-second delay won't kill you.
Text stuff: TeXshop is slow, as are a few other apps that do weird things with text, to the point where you get typing lag. But the bundled apps run fast, so I would assume this is app-specific.
Other stuff seems about up to par. Boot speed is pretty good, unless you're launching Classic at launch as well. Even emulated Classic apps run pretty fast. Warcraft III runs slow, but this is my rendering card's fault, not the OS.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Yeah, the GUI sure does seem slow on my Blue and White G3 350MHz 512MB RAM Radeon 7000, but that is not the point. Put Mac OS 7 on a Mac from 1997 and it will seem really fast. It's just that this G3 from 1998 (no matter how tricked out it is) won't run an OS from 2002 as fast as a computer from 2002 will. Although it does run an OS from 1998, even 1999 (Mac OS 9) really well.
Bottom line: Run the OS that the hardware was designed for. Or maybe one a year or two newer. But anything after that will run "slowly."
As raw tasks go, it's as fast as Mac OS 9. Encoding MP3's, playing games, etc.
Orange
Three things: Thing 1: What you describe is just not normal. You've read other posters comments using similar hardware, and they report nothing close to what you're experiencing. Something is wrong with your install. Thing 2: The racist comments against white, 2 child, SUV driving people were uncalled for. Thing 3: 512 MB RAM costs $50 bucks, affordable even to white, three child, 68 volkswagon-driving people.
I have an 800Mhz 512MB TiBook and 10.2 seems fast enough for my uses. Web, email, text editing, photo manipulation, and small compiles do fine.
I can switch back and forth between applications, unlike os9. I can also scan and do other things at the same time.
I have several Beige G3 machines that Apple says are "supported" by OS X.
HOWEVER, OS X includes only non-accelerated drivers for the graphics hardware in Beige G3 machines, meaning that on a 366 MHz G3, simple things like resizing a window are damn near impossible not because of the operating system or CPU but because OS X uses opaque resizes and opaque window moves, which (as any old Unix or Linux user knows) are terribly painful with unaccelerated graphics hardware. Minimizing a window also seems to take a century.
If only Apple or ATI would simply write a driver for the ATI graphics hardware in Beige G3 machines, OS X could be very usable on a whole generation of hardware where it is currently not very useful.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
OK, you know how your car feels faster right after you wash it? Well I tried changing my wallpaper and cleaning the Icons off the desktop... It feels like a new machine... at least twice as fast. 'cource my machine is a Sony, but since its all in your head anyway I image it will still work on a Mac.
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RIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT, like any of this is plain and simple, other than your response of course.
My experience has been that OSX 10.2 on a new G4(733) is just as fast as Windows 2000 on a 1.2 Ghz Athlon, overall. Windows is a little faster at some things and OSX is faster at others. YMMV.
Overall I am VERY happy with OSX and only satisfied with Windows 2000.
Mike
I'm using 10.2.1 on a upgraded Blue-and-White G3 ( G4/550MHz with 672MB RAM ) and about the only apps that are TRULY slow are Internet Expunger and iCal. All my apps are OS X, except for a handfull of games, one paint program and Quicken.
:-)
Gotta love the beast, it's cewl. And by the way - I came from a Linux desktop ( 7 years with Linux ! ) and the OS X is precisely what I have been waiting for Linux to become. ( yippee-ka-yee
When Windows users watch me on OS X (933MHz G4), they often comment that it is fast. The particular instances I recall are opening and displaying a PDF; and LDAP address lookup in Mail.app.
Conversely, I find it painful to watch people using Windows. Some of this may be the operating system; but in general I find Windows users less adept, which slows them down. Part of this may be a more awkward user interface, ESPECIALLY the tendency to push people towards a one-window-at-a-time environment. Very little drag and drop or cross-app integration.
I'm using an iMac vintage 2001 regularly. The processor is a G3 @ 600MHz, it has 256 MB RAM.
My first experience was with MacOS 9. Now the default boot is MacOS X.1.5.
It is faster now. And using a slim browser like Chimera does speed some things up. Internet explorer is still slow in startup and display.
I also wrote some small programs with the developer toolkit. Carbon. Compiling is reasonably fast. I can't complain.
I'm not using it for office applications. Also for gaming it's not fast enough (sadly). It's mainly my email and web computer
my G3 500MHz, 384MB, 8MB ATI chipset, DVD iBook with OS X 10.1.5 runs fairly fast. I mean it's more responsive than with OS X 10.0, and still more responsive than my K6-3 500 + 448 MB + WinME + 16MB ATI AIW 128 Pro. And I imagine in certain areas it would outperform my Duron 750 + 512MB + Win2k Pro + 32MB TNT2. So considering that my model is now severely outclassed by the fastest desktop and laptop macs, I'd say OS X is plenty fast. And when I eventually go to Jaguar I can only imagine how much responsive it'll be.
If you're looking for a fast webserver, then OS X is not going to be a cost effective solution. Not to mention the fact that serious system administrators will laugh at the idea of running a GUI on a machine that doesn't need one.
Go get yourself a nice quick x86 box and install freebsd on it. You'll have pretty much the same UNIX environment with apache as OS X, without the overhead of Aqua.
OS X Server has it's niche, but that's not it.
There are many intangible factors that could contribute to this discussion. I use OSX everyday and I love it, of course, I'm not compressing video or playing Quake 3. If you want to discuss productivity as opposed to raw computing horsepower, OSX wins everytime. Here's why:
.mac, its possible to synchonize user preferences among any number of macs... this means that no matter where I go, or what mac I am on, my bookmarks stay the same, as do all my preferences for all my apps (did I mention it remembers all my passwords for all the sites I visit also). Its now possible to have a meteor (leonidas style) hit my HD and have an identical install in less than 1 hour (from cd), no fussing about with configuring everything again.
1) No viruses.
2) I can clone my entire HD with a freeware utility (in other words, backing up is easy as pie)
3) With
4) I can install or remove RAM in less than 5 seconds on any powermac.
5) OSX.2 boots very very quick on dual processor machines... its about 15-20 seconds.
6) Apple gives you, out of box, almost all the software you need to get productive, which in turn means very few installs from cd.
7) 802.11 networking is built into the OS and every new mac... no drivers necessary.
8) Almost every printer is supported in X.2, same with cd burners, again, no drivers or installs necessary.
9) Its cool watching my linux friends not use the GUI.
Sure I am biased, being a mac head, but what would compel me to use windows or linux... I hate installing stuff,I hate viruses, I hate it when my mom asks me why she can't open attachments (for fear of virus).
About the only thing wrong with macs right now is the mouse, which imho would benefit from a few more buttons and a scroll wheel.
"Smokey, this isn't Nam, there are rules." -Walter
I bought my 867 G4 last year, December. I have ran OSX on this thing full time. I love it. I'm getting so used to OSX, that I don't think I could live without it. But here are my gripes: You ever run OS 9 on one of these newer G4s? WOW. I mean the computer feels like it's going faster than a crack addict's heart beat. Of course I am swiftly reminded that a crack addicts heart beat stops quite often, resulting in some sort of crash. iPhoto and iTunes are slow as shit. I have 40GB of Mp3s stored on a drive for iTunes, and it takes quite some time to load up. I wont even mention how it feels to run iPhoto with a couple thousand pictures. but hey, you can't do iPhoto on OS9, and iTunes would probably suck as much with a 40GB library. I have felt that OSX has grown with the new releases, just we're not all the way there yet. Dont get me wrong, I love it, etc., etc., but it's not exactly the fastest feeling OS. I attribute most of the problem to latency in opening menus and click responses. Speed that up and the OS feels 1000000000x faster. yeah.
From my own experience, having used Linux, Unix (Digital mostly), Windows 98, Windows NT, Mac OS 7.2, and Windows XP, the over all experience is similar to running Gnome on Mandrake 7. But my sister's 2000$ powerbook with OS10.2 is noticably slower than my 1000$ ThizLinux 6.0 Desknote. And to me price/performance is the only spec that matters (not Mhz).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Especially the newest release - they sped up a lot of the UI stuff. Nice and snappy.
Normal applications like e-mail, Word, that sort of thing, quick.
Hard to say on the Photoshop stuff, and plus I don't really care if something takes half a second or a full second to do if I'm waiting on some complex PS thing.
That said, I've only used the machines of friends and coworkers, I don't personally own a mac.
I do think they are really pretty.
But I do a lot of Java programming and the Mac is retarded slow with its Java compared to just about any other system out there. Even the newest one - the newest one seems to have even slower OpenGL somehow.
I also don't like that Mac has Java 1.3, and from what I can tell, you are fixed at that until they decided that they will upgrade it in their own release, regardless of the fact that there is 1.4x out for sometime now, which actually has a lot of things that some of us need and use.
All in all, I think the Mac is plenty fast, after all it is stupid to look at only the nominal speed of the processor. Look at Seti or Distributed net -there you can see that the G4 and G3 kick major ass, largely due to their much larger cache size.
And for everyday use, the Mac seems like it is just fine.
But when people say it is "better" I'm not sure I agree with them - I no longer think it sucks (OS X is pretty nice), but it isn't really of any use to me until either it becomes cheaper than a comparable PC system, or until it becomes faster than a comparable PC system.
but right now, for my personal use of it, it is only prettier, and I don't really care about that.
At least, I don't care enough to pay $2K more for a laptop that is snazzier looking than the one I sit here and type on, but slower and ill equipped for how I make my living.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Shut up.
You haven't used MacOS 9 on a 75mhz Performa, because MacOS 8.5 and above all require a PPC processor.
Perhaps we can agree to disagree!
A lot of people have attributed OSX's lack of responsiveness to Aqua. I think they're right; run XDarwin full-screen with your window manager of choice (I like Windowmaker but Fink supplies Gnome and KDE and others as well) and you'll see your mac suddenly get a big speed boost.
(If you have a new enough video card for Quartz Extreme to kick in then you may not see as much of a difference.)
For the record, I have an iBook (have since May) and its 600 MHz romps on my old 486 laptop (Tee-hee!) , but is still a trifle draggy compared to my husband's 800MHz PC. I am pretty satisfied with it except when the beachball of death spins seemingly interminably on my screen. And when the internet via our cable modem has slowed to crawl.
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Of course OS X is fast. And it's going to get faster. The question is: How much faster will it get before Steve buddy declares it, not a faster implimentation, but a new release, and expects me to pay another C-note, a la 10.0.x -> 10.1.x.
i find (on my old-style imac G3 500Mhz) that it is not responsive (ie the gui lags), but it is fast (ie when i want something doing it does it quicker than my PIII900). so it is both slow and fast.
I've got somewhat extensive experience using Windows XP, MacOS X, and Linux. These are my impressions based on a combination of subjective user experience and objective benchmark information I've found through research. I recommend that anyone seriously pondering this issue do their own research, particularly to back up the benchmark comments.
First, let's get my biases out in the open: I am a Macintosh user by (recent, OSX only) preference who's also perfectly comfortable assembling Linux or Windows PCs from bare motherboard and case right on up. I prefer UNIX-based operating systems for their stability and openness, the more stable and open the better, but find Windows inevitably the best practical choice for some situations.
I won't comment on disk and memory performance; others here have handled that ably, and I have no experience with MacOS X in very high load situations.
Processor Performance
This is the one that's subject to the most advocacy; raise your hands if you haven't heard the term "Megahertz Myth". Any hands up? Didn't think so. (Apple advocates aren't the only folks who like it; you'll hear it from AMD lovers, too.)
G3 and G4 processors run at far slower clock rates than P6-class processors. This much is objective. What Mac advocates like to claim is that G3 and G4 processors are much faster, clock for clock, than P6-class processors. The problem in evaluating this claim is that it's both false and true at the same time.
The G3 and G4 are not faster than P6-class processors at typical integer and floating point operations. They're just not. In fact, they tend to run (slightly) slower, clock for clock, in SPECmarks. They're only faster in one specialized world. The catch is, that specialized world is a major one.
Vector and matrix operations are useful in a ton of multimedia applications--most particularly image and video editing, but there are other applications as well. The G3 and G4 have much better vector units than P6-class processors. Not better, much better. This is why Apple always uses Photoshop as their benchmark: a G4 running well-optimized vector math is entirely capable of spanking a P6-class processor running at twice its clock speed or more.
So the answer to this question is that there is no definitive answer. Mac advocates will claim that graphical operations are the slowest things anyway, and so optimizing them will give you the most performance benefit overall. PC advocates will make the generalist argument, and include the (true) fact that an application must be hand-optimized for the G4's vector unit to see these performance gains.
Overall, most people think the G3 and G4 are slower for most purposes, and that the Mac won't have a serious chance at the top of the performance heap again until its next round of processor upgrades, coming next year.
UI Performance
This is the performance most people notice. I'll hit several areas of it, since there are tradeoffs.
First, the good. Aqua's overall responsiveness is probably the best of the three major windowing environments. Any of them can feel like they lose clicks or take forever to process them at times, but it generally feels like it happens less with Aqua than with either Windows or X. (Note that in X it's heavily dependent on what your desktop environment is--but most people like to use either KDE or GNOME, both of which have responsiveness issues.) Aqua also redraws on application switching faster than Windows does, and at about the same speed X does, since it handles open frames in much the same way.
Now, the bad, and it's significant. Aqua is the heaviest of the three major windowing systems; it has more and more complicated screen elements than either X or Windows. It is about as fast as Windows at drawing individual screen elements (both are faster than X under most driver configurations), but overall, it feels the slowest of any of them at general UI drawing tasks. There are also some operations--like scrolling or resizing complex frames--that are just embarassingly slow.
Overall, I like Aqua for its stability and prettiness (fonts look better on Aqua than any other UI, period), but I can see why its overhead irritates many people, especially those who've heavily customized and optimized an X setup.
That's my $0.02. Hope it helps.
On my 192Mb 400MHz G3 iMac, OS X is decidedly more sluggish than OS 9 for similar things (opening Finder windows, for example), and my wife bugs me about this regularly.
However, OS X keeps on going under circumstances where OS 9 would have just plain refused to continue: load up AppleWorks, Word, PowerPooint, IE, Print Explosion, etc. and OS X will run (and thrash a little) where OS 9 would have just said no.
And it doesn't crash, of course. I had to remind my wife that she has never, not once, lost work to a crash since installing OS X.
I get tired of people stacking the deck against Macs by claiming Macs cost too much, then inventing some insane price out of thin air, like $4500. You'd have to build a pretty high end config, like a dualie 1.25Ghz with an Ultra160 RAID. Sure, you can build a wintel dualie hotbox and get up in the same price range. But I'm blazing along on a midrange dual 1Ghz machine, and oh man is it fast, and only $2500. So what is the point of attacking a Mac on price and claiming you can't get a machine except by paying $4500?!? Even an XServe doesn't cost that much.
Anyway, I've had amazingly good performance in MacOS X, but there were a few rough edges at first. Finder was kinda slow on my old G3/400 and G3/500 machines, like sorting by kind in list view. They're getting some of the metadata stuff sorted out, the new Jag finder is all fixed up and speedy. The only laggy app seems to be the Terminal, which could use a replacement. But the core Unix apps have excellent speed. I put my old G3 into use with Apache & Quicktime Streaming Server, I'm amazed at how well it performs.
Anyway, someone commented that MacOS X is hard on the apps but cushy on the user, or something like that. Right on. That was one of the Mac's big innovations, the GUI focused on the user. When I am running something like Final Cut Pro, I want every GUI screen gadget running full max. I want every single iota of computing power focused on ME and helping me get through the complex task. This is both the Mac's greatest feature and biggest CPU bottleneck. It's like the olden days of OS 9 before preemptive multitasking, when you held down the mouse, the whole CPU would hang until you let go of the menu. Whenever you were issuing commands, the CPU gave up control to the user. It was a CPU bottleneck, and we LIKED it, it gave the MacOS the immediacy of operation, a feeling of being in control that other OSes lacked. And I think they've translated that well into MacOS X. The system GUI still remains responsive, even when you're running CPU-intensive apps. Apps like Cleaner mpeg2 compression are as CPU-intense as it gets, it can compress 1 minute of DV video in 50 seconds on my midrange CPU. Cleaner is dual processor and Altivec aware, it maxes out both my CPUs, it's as hard a CPU workout as I have found. And it still leaves the system responsive, not locked up and CPU-bound.
Whoever first mentions photoshop filters in a Mac performance discussion ends the conversation and concedes.
I got the mac relatively recently and am still not completely used to it, so, my question is, is there a way to turn off a lot of the whiz-bang graphical stuff in Aqua? I really don't give a rat's ass about whether the Dock does its little expandy-smooshy bit.
nuke the moon
I have a 400Mhz TiBook - and yes some things are VERY slow. Ironically, almost all of those things are made by microsoft. Internet explorer is probably the most noticable. Compared to chimera or Omniweb, internet explorer drags it's feet enough to make me wonder if it's on purpose. Same with word and excell. Those are definately way faster on similar pc's.
Native apps though seem to be far faster than their PC counterparts. Even on slow hardware it only takes about 6 seconds to launch my mail client, and check all of my imap accounts. My PC is supposedly 3 times as fast, but outlook express takes 15 seconds on a good day. The Mac mail app just feels more responsive too.
I guess it just depends on what you're using when you're testing. The emulated MacOS 9 stuff is dog slow - to the point of being too annoying to use. The carbon stuff is a little slow but usable. The native stuff is more quick and responsive than any enviornment I've used (other than windowmaker)
Just last week I was digging in the through a pile of old hardware in my closet and found a 120MB Maxtor HD. For grins I popped it in a spare PC to see what was on it. Well let me tell you that while the P3/500 is very happy with linux, it absolutely screams running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Wolfenstein made my head spin on it...
Alas, I tucked the drive back in it's shoe box and maybe ten years from now I will find it again. I just wonder if I will be able to find an IDE interface in ten years...
I am sure that any performance hit that OSX has is more than offset by robust features, stability, usability, and shear eye appeal...
I have a dual 533mhz G4 processor Mac, and I have to say that Mac OSX does not seem slow. I think the key is the dual processors, which OSX takes advantage of. There are several faster dual processor Macs out there, too.
I'm not saying it feels particularly fast, but I do not find it in any way slow.
I have read where Photoshop users are disappointed with the performance and generally run Pshop in OS 9. Photoshop will take advantage of dual processors in either OS 9 or OSX.
It's plenty fast, but not as fast as I wanted. So I sped it up. Here's what I did for my machine; some of it is what I routinely do to other people's machines. ymmv. ymmm. yumm.
/System/Library/StartupItems. Say Goodbye crashreporter, appletalk, and rendezvous. I was nice and had my modifications listen to /etc/hostconfig, in case I wanted to re-enable them quickly, at a later date. Most other people need networking, I've noticed, but I just need scp and ftp. ;P
First, I advise all 10.1.x users to upgrade. Then again, I work for a school, and teachers can get 10.2 for free. It's worth it. I don't care that it should be free. If you want better performance, stop griping, or run OS9. OS10.0 and 10.1 are not optimal for ordinary use.
make sure you're following the recommendation for Video RAM -- 16MB, Quartz Extreme pretty much needs it. If you can't upgrade a card, cram as much memory as you can in there, you will need it.
I wouldn't attempt to use a OSX machine with less than 256. All power users get 512MB by default.
There's an option on the installation disk (under the disk utility option, maybe?) that will reset permissions on the OS. I've noticed this would speed up a slower computer; it takes about 1/2 hour on my laptop.
Turn the machine off once in a while. I suspect OSX's memory garbage collection isn't as good as it could be. I reboot the laptop about once a month, (after I've had a finder crash, usually).
if you've got a laptop that isn't on at 3 in the morning, run the periodic files (i.e., let cron do its thing). Someone released an app that does this for the shell-feary; I forget its name. Google loves you.
Use a valid hostname. Something called "Foo's Computer" isn't valid DNS, even though it's the default (bad apple!). This will affect how long it takes to connect to the network, esp. at boot time. Having DNS entries (and reverse DNS) helps a bunch, if you're using DHCP (there are opts in bind to autofill this for you). Valid hostnames include a-z, 0-9, and "-". Have fun and be creative.
Disable what you don't need. I edited the scripts in
prebinding question. Run as root (use sudo, or, um, use root)
update_prebinding -root / -force
And wait for a bit, watching a bunch of errors spring up because the printer apps weren't prebound. You might want to do an output redirection (add something like 2&>1 ~/prebind.log to the command [or is it 2>&1?]) if you want a record of what it did.
here to help,
mike
on how well a person multi tasks. Overall, It's the same speed as windows, except when surfing the web. I can get it to render pages as quick as windows using icab or opera, but it will also be as ugly as windows when displaying the pages. For everyday work and for the average joe, it should be sufficient. The OS will be a welcome change. It will be the first time they experience the proper way to do plug and play.
Manual prebinding is no longer needed in 10.2. The first time a non-prebound app is launched, the OS will quietly prebind it behing the scenes, so the second launch will be at full speed.
Of course, many installers will still do it on install. This is kind of irritating if you have to do a lot of installs at once, like update a stock install with all the updates.
My video compression blog
As a tech support person in a school with 345 MLTI Ibooks, I can definatly vouch for the fact that OS X is slow. Everything I have ever done with it has been slow and clumsy, taking 10-15 seconds to open system preferences or view the contents of the harddrive. Even on our 2 new 4000$ xserves, OS X is slow and buggy, not to mention the fact that importing users is impossible. My office is completly disgusted with OS X, we say it reminds us more of a MS product every day. We are getting ready to start deploying linux on our ppcs because OS 9 will no longer ship with new Macs in 2003, and we need a quick, stable OS.
You can't switch applications in OS 9? You're kidding right?
I've done that about a hundred times today on my g3 500 powerbook.
Seems odd.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The slowest part is probably the GUI and 2D graphics. If you need high performance, you can fall back on the gaming and OpenGL APIs.
I have been a Mac fan for a long time. But I left the Mac fold in 1999 when I dumped my 7500 as my own personal machine. Mac OS X lured me back into buying a Mac again last year(an iBook). I have to say it is a nice OS, but very very slow. It has the reliability, and features. It does not integrate an X11 server which I find to be a big short coming. There are open source projects that can add this ability, but still not ready for prime time last time I checked. With Max OS X I get the spinning rainbow beach ball more times than I care to count.
I am at the point I prefer Linux for my OS of choice now. I may not get the seamless integration of the software, and the new hardware toys, but I can live with it. I am totally annoyed by the slow performance of OS X. Maybe if I had the newest, latest, greatest hardware that slowness wouldn't be a factor. I won't be spending any more money on Mac hardware. If Apple decides to go Intel and I can buy the OS for my PC I will try it again with the faster equipment, but as of right now I am done with it. The ibook is about to go to my kids for school.
For the last year I've been using a Powerbook 550 MHz with 768 MB of RAM and the latest incarnation of OS X (currently 10.2.1). Prior to that I have used Linux on my primary desktop OS for six years.
Truthfully, the Mac OS X GUI feels slightly slower than what would be expected under Linux or OS 9. A great (and somewhat undermentioned) example is the response time it takes to show a menu once it has been clicked on. Under OS 9, the response time was very close to nothing -- you click on "File", and immediately see what is under it. Quickly dragging back and forth across "Edit", "Window" and other menus presents a blur of menu options that pop up and disappear just as quickly as you moved over them. In OS X however, the result is somewhat less awe-inspiring; menus do show up, but there is a slightly uncomfortable lag between when the menu is selected and when it actually shows up.
Sending the system to sleep is slower in newer versions of OS X than in older versions. Under 10.1, the system slept immediately when I clicked on "Sleep". Under 10.2, there is a consistent ten second lag before it actually sleeps. I never used to put Linux machines to sleep (that sounds funny), so it is hard to compare the difference.
One reason why things are slower than other operating systems is that there is a higher overhead in displaying screen objects. Each window not only has a drop shadow attached, it can be made translucent to any arbitrary amount. I routinely run my terminals at 70-80% translucency to see through to ones underneath for quick number fetching, etc.. This, just like running transparent Eterms on Linux, incurs higher overhead.
Another problem with system responsiveness seems to be related to the age of the user account. If you have been using the same user account for a long time (and have lots of application settings, cache files, temporary files, data files under your home directory, etc.), the overall system performance seems a lot slower than a new user. Switching to "root" for instance, reveals an incredibly fast interface, as if nothing were installed on the system. I am sure there are "Spring Cleaning" types of applications out there, but I haven't looked into them yet.
What I would suggest if you are interested in purchasing an Apple, but are concerned with the system responsiveness, is to visit an Apple store or a local CompUSA or Fry's and try out the system you are interested in purchasing. Load up a million terminal screens, play MP3s in the background, do whatever you intend on doing with it when it's yours. This obviously won't reveal long-term responsiveness trends, but it will give an idea as to what sort of performance you would see.
I can attest from personal experience that the usability and durability of a system is more important than just the speed. My Powerbook may not run perl scripts as fast as my Linux box, but it has a certain charm that makes it all OK. It's kind of like what Doc Brown said in Back to the Future when building a time machine: "If you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?" The Delorean may not be a Formula 1 race car, but it still gets the job done very nicely.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
- It's my web browser (Chimera and/or Explorer)
- It's my web server, (Apache/PHP).
- It's my webcam.
- Running Photoshop.
- Running Reason
- Running LimeWire
The ONLY time i have ever experienced ANY lag is when a transparent window tries to "Genie" into the Dock. Other than that, it occationally locks up in Explorer with the rainbow CD cursor, which can be fixed by clicking on another running application, the Dock or desktop space (i.e. Finder) included. I also run the same OS on my mother's 350Mhz G4 box, with nearly the same performance.It's not such a heavy load, but then again, think about these same activities on a 400Mhz Wintel machine. Ouch.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Actually Phoenix uses XUL too. The XUL UI for Mozilla is just badly written.
DNA just wants to be free...
Apple doesn't care very much about European customers....(Let alone pricing outside the US, which is just horrible)
That's a brilliant assesment. In fact, Apple probably doesn't care about any of their non-US customers, which is why prices are so unbelievably high. Except in places like Japan, where the prices are nearly identical to those in the States.
Hit www.apple.co.jp and you'll see that a fully loaded iBook costs 231,100 yen. Convert that and you get US$1,897.
A fully loaded iBook from www.apple.com costs US$1,849.
Furthermore, you walk through Shinjuku or Omotesando, and you'll see more shiny Apples than you know what to do with. I've found brand new Macs in South America, too. Even had a repair job on a new powerbook and sat in on an Apple sponsored multimedia conference in Santiago, Chile.
So before you go spouting off about how Apple dicks over their European cutomers, you might want to reconsider. You might want to think about why it is you Europeans love paying all those taxes--all that free healthcare and higher education has got to get paid for somehow. Take a look at those 20% luxury taxes on things like electronics you guys are paying.
When I want socialized medicine, I'm moving to Europe. When you want cheap toys, you might consider a trip to the States.
My other computer is your Windows box
There's other speed issues, too, which I believe are probably tied in to all the extra crap Apple makes to go through to, for instance, minimize a window, or pull up a dialog box. If OSX would just *do* what I want it to do, rather than animating everything possible, it might feel a lot faster. (We've turned off all of the animations you can turn off from the control panels; there may be "hidden" tweaks.)
Personally, I thought it was all right, but perhaps my experience running M[whatever] release Mozillas and KDE2, etc, has made me a bit more accepting. The actual applications ran all right, and having the command line was a dream. My GF absolutely loathed the speed, though. She refuses to have anything to do with it, and compared with OS9 for doing basic tasks, it's easy to see her point.
I'm not sure what kind of graphics card is in there (I've never much paid attention to Mac hardware until OSX came along, because I've thought that the OS was horrendous), so it might not be using their Quartz Extreme (or whatever) technology, which evidentally GL-accelerates all the window management, etc. That would certainly speed things up a bit. Also, I'm fairly sure it's one of the lower-end blue G3s, so a faster machine would probably do better with it.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
but usually i'm talking about mutlitasking (i run aim, chimera, and dvd player like an avg teen net freak.) if i run/focus on a single application at a time then sure os X is fine. I just prefer how os 9 gives more processor time to the forefront app. i feel os x still gives a valuable 5% to an app that's hidden and doesn't have any windows open.
I think it's related to a slow upgrade track on behalf of the user. 10.2 is plenty fast.
(It sure beats Win98 SE!)
It's no secret that the OS X GUI makes massive performance sacrifices for the sake of prettiness. It's especially hard on low-memory systems, since rather than redrawing windows when you bring them to a foreground, it saves a big honking bitmap of the whole window. It doesn't take many windows before you have to start going to disk. I suppose if you have 2 gigs or so, this would be faster than redrawing, maybe. Apple's business model should be to invest in RAM manufacturers and drive RAM sales with new releases of OS X.
For great justice.
This is quite possibly the funniest shit I've ever read on Slashdot.
I've noticed a general trend among people i'm acquainted with that their favorite OS feels fast to them, but any others are slow. For example, a Mac fan will think Mac OS is nice and speedy but will complain about Windows and Linux as being slow. Whereas a Linux user will complain about Mac and Windows being too slow.
I have two theories on what might cause this. The first is that different systems spend relatively different amounts of time on various tasks. And since they don't work exactly as what one is used to, and most people tend to notice flaws fairly readily, the slower areas are easily noticed and the system feels slow. My other theory is that people notice the user interface differences and since they aren't used to it they want to complain, but not having anything specific to complain about they claim it to be slow. I don't know the real reason. Any other ideas?
----- "I'm still sane on three planets and two moons."
If, in OS 9, you have a dialog box open and need to check a file name in a window behind it, you have to cancel out of the box. In os X or classic, you can just click on the window you want.
OS X applications have problems with scrolling speed. I've done some research of my own while trying to figure out how to write an application that scrolls quickly. No success, because the problem is caused by a slow text rendering engine. A window with only a little bit of text scrolls quite quickly, but a window with a lot of text scrolls very slowly.
I have a desktop G2, read that as a 5-year old 200 MHz PowerPC, and I find it to be quite quick. I use a 1.5 megabit RCN cable modem connection for internet, Mozilla, OSX 10.5 and I see NO reason to buy a new machine.
Sweet!
Oh and the more external firewire hard drives you have, the longer the "spinning gear" appears on startup and shutdown.
WARNING. Do not abort shutdown when the gear is spinning. I've lost two drives that way.
Don't now what goes on then but sure makes the OS seem fragile.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Now we have a scheme where your normally-dormant hotshot GPU is helping out with drawing the OS.
Haven't Linux and Windows used acclerated hardware video drivers for drawing their GUI for many years? I'm talking about Windows 95 era, possibly even WFWG 3.11. I'm sorry if it only takes a $30 "hotshot" graphics card to accelerate the rendering of a perfectly usable 2-D GUI in X or Win32, but them's the breaks.
I expect Microsoft to go through similar growing pains when they go for the photorealistic desktop in Longhorn.
Growing pains? Okay, but be careful what you label growth or progress. Are 3D or photo realistic GUIs easier, more reliable, or more productive? I think they might be more attractive and way cool, but is that really net "growth" considering the immense R&D and consumer expense to get it?
Well, I guess I'm a typical Mac user. I have a shiny new iMac and absolutely no idea how many giga-somethings-or-other are in there. I've always felt that comparing computer speeds is like comparing penis sizes. Winning the contest doesn't necessarily mean you get the girl you want. In short: Speed is not why I bought a Mac. It's a nice, friendly computer that does everything I want it to do without driving me nuts as Windows used to. What do I care if some other OS is a tad bit faster?
Certian apps move nicely, but using a 800MHz iMac on an Airport through a VPN is horrably slow comparied to XP on the same Airport through the same VPN. Just opening the finder on the fileserver involves getting a cup of coffee. The ones on the LAN are faster, but the hesatation is still there. I am starting to hate that spinning pinwheel. Aqua is such a pain, eventually I'll get Linux running on my dual 867 then I can fiannaly get work done.
OS X, the power of UNIX with a screwed up interface.
no
This is the question you should have asked.
.
.
I'm used to working on Windows, SuSe+KDE+X, MacOS9, MacOSX since many years and all I can say is, that _I'm_ fastest on MacOS9+X (from the early DP on)
It doesn't get in my way and works as expected whereas I'm constantly wondering how to achieve specific tasks on Windows.
I don't care about window-redraw-times etc as long as they stay in some decent interval. And that's exactly what they do on my iBook500/512
The personal speed increase you experience while using OSX has a daily effect whereas the advantage of a P4/XP doesn't do much to an average computer users life.
k2r
If you have one window open in one application it is not too bad.
But if you're a developer that's not likely.
With a couple projects open in PB, a few remote shells open, a mail app updating in the background, etc. it can become unbearably slow. Ridiculously slow. Far far slower than any other system on a comparable box under comparable load. There seem to be two reasons: there seems to be some kind of blocking or stalling happening in the networking layers, resulting in remote shells (and everything else running while they are connected) being very very laggy, and it creates a full buffer for every window, resulting in ridiculous memory use and swapping even when you have a G of ram. At work I have to develop on a 450 g4, single processor and it is driving me nuts. Feels less responsive at times than any computer/system I've used in years. When I switch to OS X Server 1.2 to work on legacy apps, it feels lightning fast by comparison, even though that box has only half the RAM.
And I really miss the smoothness of event management using interrupts. Inconsistent mouse cursor movement was one of the things I hated most about windows, now we have it on mac too.
I've used Macs since 1984. MacOS X is slow. Period.
For comparison, I fired up my old 40MHz Quadra 840AV. It was slower than my 667MHz TiBook, but not even remotely close to 15x slower. My 180MHz 8500 running the BeOS is easily 3x more responsive than my TiBook.
Everyone has their own theories about why it is slow. Most are probably true, such as:
MachO is slower than CFM
Quartz is a memory hog due to its backing store design
Too many layers - APIs on top of APIs on top of APIs (this is my personal choice)
It really needs to be fixed, but Apple has little incentive to fix it when reviewers refuse to publicize the problems. Plus Apple wants you to buy new systems that run faster.
But oh my gosh, OSX is slow on an old Blue and White.
Great Question! When phrased like this I have to say I had no idea. But what a great way to test the OS.
./configure
./configure portion under OSX. Didn't look good for OSX. Made me begin questioning the development environment.
Okay,
First off I couldn't build the UCD-SNMP libraries in OS9, so the question has to be a simple comparison of compilation times in a controlled fashion using Linux versus OSX on my existing 667 PowerBook g4.
For those who do not understand why, the libraries do not exist in OS9. Yet in both linux ppc and OSX all libraries do exist, and can build. Well, heck there isn't even a console in OS9, and these are console commands that are being built.
For the record, the GUI feels very snappy in Linux (using the KDE default that came with SuSE linux PPC). Sometimes OSX 10.2 feels snappy, and sometimes it seems it is waiting for something. But none of this has to do with the question above, which was speed difference between OS. To me the purest test of an OS is how fast the same code can build on either.
I used gcc which came with ver 7.2 SuSE linux PPC and the devloper disk shipped with OSX 10.2
I used the code available in tarball from http://www.sourceforge.net.
tar -zxvf was lightning fast on OSX. However, I think the scrolling was the lag behind on Linux. The disk didn't seem to be working after just a few seconds. Anyway, on to the real test:
The configure portion under linux was lightning fast. 20 seconds whizzed by. I believe that may have been that the code found everything it was expecting much quicker. It was 51 seconds to complete the
Linux 20 seconds
OSX 51 seconds
make
I did this on linux, and have to admit there were some issues. Found numerous problems with the compiler settings. However, this code is usually built (at least by me) on a Solaris box. In any case, eventually I got all errors run through, and sucessfully built the binaries.
Linux: 2 minutes 14 seconds (on final run).
On OSX things went much smoother, first time through. However, the screen showed tons of errors regarding invalid pointer references, etc. Was very skeptical if code would run. However, that shouldn't effect the time it takes to crunch out the machine code right?
OSX: 1 minute 31 seconds
make install
Linux did this like cake walk. I think the libpaths and all are setup quite well on linux. However, this is once again development environment setup, right?
Linux: 34 seconds
OSX seemed confused. It seemed I had more messages, or just they scrolled by much slower. I could see it linking the object files.
OSX: 48 seconds
NOTE: I did not mention the "umask 022" portion which was instantaneous on both machines.
Bottom line:
This is probably all meaningless, however the code built under OSX works against my stack of routers. I can use snmpget, snmpwalk, and snmpset without problems.
The linux code is somehow broken. Typing the commands without commandline switches gives the proper display output (usage information), however when it tries to actually attach to an snmp device it does not appear to work.
My suspicion is some kernel option or environment option in linux. By putting my HP internet LAN advisior (a sophisticated sniffer/analyzer) on the line I could see no packets originating from the linux load. I could telnet to the routers, so I know it was not networking - at least not basic networking.
I will delve into this to try to get better information.
Right now though, it seems to me to be a pretty close match between the linux load and the OSX load on the same hardware. The compiling seemed slower on the Linux boot, however setting up all of the environment seemed considerably faster. Keeping in mind that the end result of the linux load seemed to build but did not function.
Any ideas?
Thing 3: 512 MB RAM costs $50 bucks, affordable even to white, three child, 68 volkswagon-driving people.
The box belongs to a non-profit school who cant afford to pay their employees. 50 bucks is a lot of money.
asshole.
ps: you are racist smart guy.
Every time I have an application spin too much, I can ALWAYS force quit it. Even the finder. Better yet, when an app (like IE, for instance) gets stuck in a loop, I can switch apps and, guess what? The cursor returns to normal!
Do you actually use that OS X box, or are you just on it?
I am not saying that the rest of you guys are madmen, but with that many comments of "yes" and "no", are just detracting from the conversation.
/proc/bogomips are any kind if rating, the Mac really doesnt match up to anything in the intel standards, even the dual CPU versions.
Yes, Mac OSX is slow, apple have got to all lenghts to stop you from knowing this, visual appeal when "task switching", bouncing icons to keep your brain entertained while it struggles to load applications. There is an internal paper at apple, that is designed JUST for this purpose.
But its not like they have "intended" it to be slow. Building layer apon layer, attempting backwards compatibility, user interface enhancements, do take their toll on these poor little RISC cpu's.
Compiling and testing Gentoo linux on the x-serve, does make it look quite speedy, although without running X, and "word" to prove it.. I guess it will never know.
If
It seems as though apple, being unable to "Sell" G4 chips, have decided the quickest way to move them out the door is to put two on one board. Brilliant!.
Apple isnt dead yet, because the die hard apple users cant see past the faults in the hardware. But obviously, apple makes their money in hardware (see BMW like pricetag), but people still buy BMW's.
Steve has a plan, and he doesnt care, if its the fastest or the best, he is in the game to make money, and be cool.
To show the media monkeys that it doesnt require someone to be dressed in a suit to make a million dollars.
Anyway, thts enough of my rant, im sure this post will be lost into the abyss known as overload.
Thanks for your time.
Skipstone,
uses GTK+ for interface, and Phoenix, a slimmed-down Mozilla, but still using XUL for the interface. There used to be a project named K-Meleon, aimed at creating a native win32 browser based on Gecko, but I haven' been able to access their site for ages now.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Meant to say at the end that it did not appear to be a networking issue - at least not a basic networking issue.
Sorry, clicked on submit, meant to preview (schmuck).
Why not dual boot or even triple boot OS 9, OS X, and a PPC Linux like Yellow Dog. use the systems for similar task for a day in each OS. Then see what feels slow, and when doing what kind of tasks.
"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things."
I bought a Mac out of quasi-necessity; I am a musician and I have been using Emagic Logic Audio for a number of years. Apple recently bought Emagic, and naturally, PC support went out the window (no pun intended).
I also have two other systems at home; a dual PIII 800 and a dual Athlon 1.2 GHz. I wrote a quick PHP script to measure the execution time on a loop that calculates primes between two fixed numbers, and I ran it on the Mac, my Linux server, and my Linux workstation.
Here's the results (average of three runs):
Perhaps it's just that PHP isn't as fast on an OS X box, but I basically used untuned, default installs on all three machines. The numbers were the same on the Linux boxen with or without X running.
For me, the Mac feels slower, and to me, my quick and dirty benchmark only confirms what I feel.
FWIW, Here's the code:
<?php
function timenow() {
list($microsec, $sec) = explode(" ",microtime());
return ($microsec + $sec);
}
$count = 0; //arbitrary starting point //arbitrary ending point
echo "Calculating...\n\n";
$loopstart = 6000;
$loopend = 7000;
$start = timenow();
if ($notprime == false) $count++;for ($x = $loopstart; $x <= $loopend; $x++) {
$notprime = false;
}
$end = timenow(); ." seconds to calculate\n";
echo "There are $count primes between $loopstart and $loopend\n";
echo "This took ". ($end - $start)
?>
What about some numbers like Mozilla takes X secs with some configurations, and then boot up with NetBSD and say Mozilla takes X other secs.
./ that has two Macs with the same specs to do some scientific tests?
Is there anyone in
C'mon!
I use a Dell Inspiron laptop (1.8GHz, 512MB RAM) with XP the whole day at work and I use a friends TiPB 800MHz with OSX 10.2 on occaision (I have an old 333MHz G3 PB at home with OSX 10.1.5).
:)
XP is very stable compared to previous MS OS's. I haven't had the OS crash on me once yet. But the UI is also considerably slower than Win2000 and more confusing. Much more confusing. And that, for me, is the major point about OSX. The UI is extremely pleasing to work with over long periods of time. It's smooth and very good looking. The large buttons and type don't hurt my eyes after sitting in front of the machine for 8 hours at a time. The simplicity and clean design of OSX make it easy to hit those buttons without having to pause and concentrate on hitting the correct link unlike in XP where i suffer a considerable amount of arm, neck and hand strain after long hours in front of it. The plain, simple idea of having *all* control panels in one place *without* the Windows mess of myriad unrelated dialog boxes makes it easier to change settings, without first having to find the settings. All programmes have the preferences option in the same place, which is another plus compared to windows. And if I need the detail, power and complexity of Unix the Terminal is a click on the dock away. The Console in WinXP has improved in usability and power (Tab completion, file dragging for paths, output redirection etc) but is still not close to a Unix shell.
As for Applications, Photoshop and illustrator are more sluggish than in XP, except for redraw operations on large bitmaps where Altivec really shines, and I for one tend to work methodically in those programmes and appreciate a programme that doesn't run away from me.
If I had the money right now, I would go and buy a TiPB with OSX immediately and only use the Dell for Windows tasks.
My name is Theo Stauffer. I'm a Sys Admin for a small company and I would switch back to the Mac immediately if I had the cash
A dual 1GHz G4 OS X system vs the $300 cheaper dual Athlon 1800+ MP WinXP box, which normally comes with a gig of RAM, but they ripped out half of it so both systems would have the same. Who wins anyway? The MP by about 70% every test.
[533MHz 512MB G4 OS X] / [633MHz 128MB $399 Compaq Celeron WinXP] times: startup 102s/41s...login 19s/6s...launch IE 10s/3s...scrolling a PDF 50s/33s...shutdown 36s/19s.
"Truth is, the G4 is little more than a G3 with a slightly better math section and an internal graphics coprocessor (AltiVec)."
Don't forget this, too.
1. Get version 10.2.1 2. Get a RADEON or better 3. Get 512MB+ of RAM 4. Get rid of the Internet Explorer and Mozilla, which run at glacial speeds on Mac OS X, and use Chimera or Opera
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
My G4 is:
400Mhz
512MB
2 20GB Fujitsu HDs
DVD
AGP
10.2.1
Everything is plenty fast. In fact most things are faster than the Wintel 850. Especially Mathy things.
Every now and then a program will get _slow_ . I just restart that app and all is good.
I would say on my pending TiBook OS X should rock even harder.
This
I've been using OS X for quite some time now on an iBook (G3 700/128 RAM), a TiBook (G4 500/256 RAM) and a G4 tower (867 DP/768 RAM), and the experience is different on each. On the tower, Jaguar screams; speed is just not an issue. And I install lots of extra stuff. On the TiBook things aren't quite as fast but still I don't find speed a problem. On the iBook I sometimes slow to a crawl as I listen to the computer access the hard drive back and forth for swap space. So I think RAM is the culprit. The clock speed of the iBook is faster than the TiBook yet it runs slower because there just isn't enough RAM (especially if I run more than a couple of applications). OS X is RAM-intensive (especially pre-Jaguar; if you have OS X 10.1.5 on an older Mac you should really upgrade for a noticeable speed improvement). Now I just need to get some RAM for the iBook since it's the computer I use most of the time....
Based on some rather crude metrics OS X doesn't seem so bad for its rated clock speed. My Power PC crunches out SETI@home pacs faster than windows boxes at simular clock speed. Running unix stuff on the Darwin shells seems OK, get the performance I would expect from MySQL, Tomcat etc, some of the Desktop gadgetry seems slow (like IE). I general I find it makes a great dev server, less hassle than Solaris, simular performance for less $$ than Solaris. Mark MM
For comparison I have:
... basically I have seen all relevant modern OS's out there, ... so I'm not talking out of my ass.
(1) iMac 233 (Bondi, rev B)
160MB RAM, 40GB Fujitsu replacement HD
(1) Pentium 233 mmx, 128MB RAM, 6GB HD
The iMac is much slower running OS X, than it was when running OS 9. But you might have guessed that. This applies to ALL versions of 10 right up to the latest (Jaguar).
The PC which should by all rights be slower (P223 vs G3 233 ) and less RAM (128 vs 160) and an older HD, is much faster running Windows XP than OS X. The PC has a generic ATI Rage Pro 8MB (the iMac has a Rage Pro 6MB) - and I run both at 1024 x 768. Internet Explorer is miles faster on the PC. Word/Excel/Powerpoint are the same. Actually every application from the calculator to the terminal (SecureCRT) is faster on the PC. The Mac (Jaguar) takes a long time to launch each one. The lack of an accelerated video driver for the Rage Pro under OS X contributes to slower graphics performance when dragging windows around.
In short, while the two computers are side by side, I choose the PC every time to do my work on. At first I tried to use the iMac exclusively. Just not practical - and yes I realize this is an older iMac, but please, it is not obsolete. If the PC can run just fine with a current OS, well... (and yes I would like to try XP on it but don't have it)
In case you think I'm some Windows clone spewing crap, you should know that I have been a Mac guy since the Classic II. I have five Macs from that little guy to this iMac, 2 SGI's, one Bebox, 2 FreeBSD x86 boxes, one OpenBSD x86 box,
iMac 233 + Jaguar = dedicated iTunes box.
That's it. Slow slow slow.
New Macs seem faster (I have used them) but certainly not the level of performance I expect for the price. Supercomputer my ass. (And I would say the same thing of XP on the latest x86 hardware... it's not exactly mind-blowing - unless you play games).
Cheers
Bassil
One thing that I will note that I find interesting and annoying. Is the fact that my Windows machines tend to BECOME slower as the install ages. I guess I would attribute this to cruft but I can't conclusivley find anything. I have the XP box pretty slimmed down and definitely NO roll-back functions are running. But the Windows installs DO get slower with age. My Mac, just happily purrs along...
P.S. Don't bother infering my preference from this post. I'm not a mac FREAK, nor am I a Windows bigot. My computer room is a commune where everyone works together.... for my benefit of course. (Does that make me the tzar?)
One thing about NeXTStep and OSX was is was developed to be around for a long time. Design decisions were made based on what was best for the long term life of the product, not on the day's median technology. The thought always was that hardware will catch up. OSX is very snappy on most contemporary Mac hardware.
When watching The Simpsons in QuickTime it's choppy?
How about when you're watching Futurama; that any quicker?
The Hack? You mean the checkbox in the preferences that says "Disable font anti-aliasing"?
You must be using 10.0 or 10.1. You may even be using the hack in those versions to enable terminal transparency. I found the terminal.app to be shit, frankly, in those versions. ANSI color for programs like Mutt or BitchX was poor, hacking transparency left artifacts in the terminal window, anti-aliased andaleMono was ugly, things were slow (as you mentioned). I would strongly recommend using Xdarwin+rxvt for all your command line needs, or upgrading to 10.2. In Jaguar, the terminal program is greatly improved, and all the hacks mentioned above are actual working features now.
I use the machine as a web/mail/file server and for those tasks is is quite fast. In fact, I bet it would run faster if I could disable the graphics entirely.
Have you considered simply installing Darwin?
"not the dual 1.25GHz machines that sell for $4500+."
This is really specious--you'd have to tweak and add crap to a system to hell and back to get that mac at that price point. Go to their store, check online--that is just silly.
I have to say I was extremely surprised, but by new 700mhz ibook/radeon/384MB ram runs Much Slower than my friend's 2 year old 500mhz pentium III laptop from Dell. This is with Jaguar. My friend borrowed it recently, and they accidentally turned it off, and I was like "Oh no!" They asked me why and I explained it would take too long to boot up. It's been years since I had to deal with my main shell crashing and 5 minute boots. I don't know what Apple was thinking.
Dear Slashdot:
What's the best way to rile up a flamewar?
After I bought my dual 1GHz tower I put OSX on my old beige desktop G3 and the performance actually improved. Using the Cisco VPN client to connect to work and using the Microsoft Desktop Connection program to reach my Win2000 box works perfectly. Fast and stable. Working from home was never so good - best part: two words - NO PANTS.
I've been drooling over an OSX Mac for a while, but I earn my money writing software for Windows. That being said, is OSX now fast enought to reasonable host Virtual PC and Visual Studio.net? I'd be willing to spring for a top of the line Powerbook or G4, but I'd need the environment to run at (hopefully) something like 80% of what I get on my P4 2Ghz machine.
Note: I currently have a Toshiba laptop and a Dell Desktop, and they both rock as development platforms. However, getting a Mac (especially a laptop) would be really fun and let me start experimenting with developing for the Mac GUI (I've already got a fair amount of linux/unix systems programming experience, so that would be a nice starting place on the mac).
Anyone doing this?
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
No, Mac OS X's minimum RAM requirement is listed as 128MB.
It's slow mind you, but that's the minimum required...
Way to troll, very subtle. The astroturfers are getting better.
yes. I know OSX can do ftp and http. Damn firewall.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
The only time I've seen an XP box crash is on a box that also runs FreeBSD and Linux for days on end without a single problem. But Winshit XP has crashed on this box. And I even went to the trouble of doing a bunch of kernel compiles under linux to stress-test the hardware. Still only crashes under Windows XP.
PS:
Only fucking dipshits use the word "boxen".
CPU Speed - 800MHz eMAC
Seti == 10.5 hours / unit
RC5 == 8,000+ keys per sec
Celeron 1GHz
Seti == 7.5 Hours / unit
RC5 == 2,000+ keys / sec
Graphical speed.
Have not used OSX10.1 but I'm happy with OSX 10.2
It is a bit sluggish when trying to resize windows (iTunes - with the new metal look). Other apps that use the standard aqua look resize with decent speed.
I had the misfortune of putting 10.2 on my 450mhz iMac.
:-(
10.1 was just horrible, but only over time (just like how Windows gets worse over time). Anyway, I found that installing 10.2 over a previous version of 10.1 gives a clearly slower perceptive speed than if the 10.2 installation wipes the HD and does a straight install.
On my iBook, I have found that I get the swirly wheel-gig of death much more often when we were told we wouldn't have a problem with the finder anymore
I recently purchased a malaysian slutlet for my wife... we previously had a laotian, and it crawled. Neither of us would even want to use it, it was so bad.
After getting malaysian, my chocha runs amazingly well, and not just for the eyecandy, etc. Compared to other ho's, I would say it's right about on target...sure, it's a little sluggish having multiple orifices open, but most sex machines are.
I'm kind of surprised to see this question at all...malaysians have struck me as very fast, all things considered.
Okay. So whether OS X is slow or not is debatable, as we can see from the multitude of relies in this forum. Does anyone know of any any programs that will essentially speed up OS X by possibly reducing the amount of graphical eye-candy?
Correction: It is Mac OS X that is based on Objective-C. Linux/PPC systems are (all kernel, all Xfree86 and most of server applications) written on C.
And Gentoo/PPC on G3 powerbooks (without AltiVec) makes a way better (faster) optimization results than Mac OS X.
So no Macs aren't slow
Especially when Linux/PPC (namely Gentoo) is the OS installed on that Mac :)
Less is more !
OS 9 is fast if you like to do one thing at a time.
If you like to have mp3s playing while browsing the web, use OS X...
I have a 400mhz Ti-Book with 256megs of RAM. I love how pretty OSX is, but it's DOG SLOW on my machine. Yesterday I was leaning over someone's desk in the office and I was amazed at how fast her machine was. Her machine is a 2nd generation (green) iMac. It's something like a 266mhz G3 with 128megs of RAM, and it was much faster than a G4 400mhz powerbook with twice as much ram! It really hurts b/c I spent about a grand on software to make the move. When I get in in the morning I run Entourage, IE, Filemaker, Word and Excel, and every application is slower. I won't even talk about those few times I have to use Virtual PC. Some of this is perceptive stuff, and some is clearly slow performance. For instance, when I hit save and an alert comes up... it does this silly little animation, which means it takes an extra half second to do ANYTHING. But other programs are just wrong. For instance Entourage I've done the following: 1) I hit "command-N" for a new message 2) type in christine (my wife) for name 3) tab four times (to subject... used to be twice in outlook) 4) type a subject like "what's up for diner tonight?" 5) tab again 6) type "hey honey, " RESULT: I can be a whole sentence into the body of a message before the UI catches up, at which point I realize it never caught Christine as my wife.. so I have to mouse back up to the top of the email, delete the bogus email address and put in the new one. I just reinstalled the system, and it appears to have helped.. but not much. I also got my hands on a firewire drive, and I'm going to try erasing the hard drive.. but if that doesn't help my next step is to try to get my mail out of Entourage and back into Outlook for OS9. I LOVE how pretty OSX is, but it's just not up to using office on my machine.
And you're saying the 75mhz PPC processor in the Performa isn't a PPC processor?
My, aren't your wits crafted from high quality shit?
No, it's just special.
Honestly thought as others have posted it faster at networking, startup/shutdown, and app launch than any win32 variant than I've ever used.
Haha, Pinky's a real idiot!
OWNED!
Mac OS X itself as an OS is fine.
:o)! and I can always switch from one process to another without problems.
As said by others here it's not the subsystems that are slow..
Where using OS X is slow is in some UI operations.
I can play some mp3-encoded music, write something in word, have 15 tabs open in Chimera, and have quake running in the background (or in windowed mode
I only have a 350mhz iMac (although with 512mb ram as of recently, up from 192).
My model mac has a very sorry video card (ATI Rage128 8mb).
The UI is slow under hi-cpu load because I don't have a video card that supports Quartz Extreme.
Even with Quartz Extreme this problem arises because not all of the UI operations (such as the UI shadowing effect) have been moved over to the GPU as of yet.
The effect of this problem is much less noticeable on G4 macs because the vector processing of the G4 takes the load of these operations off the main CPU and processes in 128-bit chunks.
So, if you have G4 and a video card that supports Quartz Extreme (even if it dosnt have a lot of CPU horsepower) it wont 'feel' slow, UI wise.
From my experience something that needs work in OS X is the usage of CPU priority.
A nice 20, or nice -20 task does not run as it should.. The kernel doesn't make a nice 20 task only get completely free CPU cycles.. And -20 tasks don't completely take over the CPU as they should.. Other than 1 task (a program that fixes bad prebindings in 10.2) there is no usage of cpu priority (The cpu priority not working as it should may be why).. Until 10.1 OS X didn't support cpu priority at all.
One other nit-pick is the usage of all unused ram for disk cache seems to strain things a bit when it has to deallocate memory every time a task asks for a bit of memory if the ram is full of disk cache. (Although, this feature is very helpful) My guess is they need to deallocate the cache in larger chunks to help with this.
Now that I have 512mb ram this no longer seems to be a problem. Most other mac users I know also put gobs of memory in their mac if they are running OS X.
If you don't have Quartz Extreme enabled card the all open windows are buffered in ram!
You also have to consider most applications for OS X are written in the carbon API. That API was designed to ease the pain of porting programs from The older versions of mac os.. So there is a lot of translation going on there.. The old mac APIs were about like windows version 3.
All things considered I think apple is doing a fine job of moving OS X along and trying to iron things out. And OS X performs damned well when you understand what all is really going on to make the very nice looking GUI you get.. And no I'm not a mac bigot.. I use *nix and mac and windows.
Thanks everyone.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
I'm a hardened Mac OS user, have been a graphic designer for the last ten years. I love Mac OS 8.6 and 9.2. Everything works just fine. OS X is definitely fast enough in terms of the applications working away, doing calculations - but the damned GUI is slow. And depressingly it's the animations, the sliding drawers, sheets - the icing which has been added - which really slows me down. Why can't us "professional" users have a simpler GUI which doesn't feature time-wasting animations?
at certain crucial things. For example, scrolling long lists of files in Finder windows are lightning fast under OS9 on my G4 PowoerBook, but are almost unuseably slow under OSX on the same hardware. It drives me insane.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
I frequently shut off the aqua and run full x11 mode so it's like a true unix box. Sure it's a heck of a lot faster using wmaker or twm as the windowmanager, but gnome or kde which are LACKING in the amount they can do compared to OSX are slower. Most people think of Aqua when they think macintosh whereas this is not the case. The operating system is just as fast, it depends on how much dressing you like with your gui salad.
While my snappy answers to stupid questions usually end here, I feel I should elaborate, lest I be called a troll or worse a (gasp) Linux user.
I feel I have sufficent knowledge to answer this question in the affirmative based on my following experiences:
So is Mac OS X slow? In my experience, yes. Does that matter to me? No, as it's not my platform of choice (see my signature) and it's not free anyway. I just use it as a tool in my professional life and to develop my software so that will have a wider audience.
Nathan's blog
Speed may depend on how the application was compiled. I've been developing some software on my iBook, and have found -O3 optimizations to produce code that is 6 to 7 times faster than the unoptimized counterparts.
The middle mind speaks!
I've run OSX on a 400MHZ G4, and trust me I had/have no interest in bashing OSX.
The fact is, I WANTEd to run OSX because Linux(the other alternative) had such crappy fonts, and was just generally (visually) unpleasant to use.
Much to my disappointment the simple navigation of basic apps like a browser and IDE were sluggish (not HORRIBLY) but to the point where I said fuckit and reinstalled Linux.
--Moi
...and I wound up running Photoshop 5 inside of Classic.
I've stuck with 5 since 5.5 came out- every release after changes more things that I liked into things I can't use to do my job- so I wasn't enthused about 7. I gave it a spin anyway.... and went right back to 5 in Classic after 7 stole focus too many times.
5 is a bit spastic running under Jaguar, but it does two things 7 can't- window shade and stay in the background.
The only problem I have with the operating system UI is the lack of window shading.
I have NO END of issues with the present state of OS X third party applications- particularly the Adobe suite, which has decided to completely ignore the full Aqua common command structure, and the windowing behaviour in Macromedia apps.
Final conclusion: OS X is great. OS X apps suck something fierce (unless we're talking video, in which case it's an AMAZING improvement....).
This is why I use X at work and 9 on my powerbook, which I don't do any video editing on anyway.
That's bloaty mozilla works way slower on both Mac OS X and Windows for me comparing to both Linux/x86 and Linux/PPC.
I think the problem is in swapping: both Windows NT and Mac OS X have very bad (slow) implementation of swapping. For example, it is not a bad idea that Linux uses a separate swap partiion.
Besides swapping, don't forget the speed of Ext3 (in some journalling modes) comparing to both NTFS and HPFS.
Less is more !
I've been waiting for several months for the 'crash' function to work.
It hasn't even showed up in top... maybe the process hung?
I really can't wait to use the 'recover from crash' function.
Correction: It is Mac OS X that is based on Objective-C. Linux/PPC systems are (all kernel, all Xfree86 and most of server applications) written on C.
I fail to see the correlation between the two, if you would have said "Mac OS X is based on objc, and Darwin is based on C.", I would have seen that. By saying Mac OS X specifically, it appears like you're going for comparison to Mac OS 9, which is also C. I guess you're saying that specifically Mac OS X uses objc, but Linux on a Mac is C. Well, traditionally, Apple is the hardware and Mac is the OS.
I have four computers on my home LAN. The Windows 2000 boxes are a Pentium 2 233 with 96MB RAM and a Pentium 3 600 with 384MB RAM. The two Macs are an iBook 600 with 384MB RAM and a PowerMac G3 450 with 512MB RAM.
In my opinion, both of my Macs are faster than the Windows boxes. I run only OS X. I don't even have Classic installed. Both platforms have the occasional hiccup where I'm waiting on the computer to do something. However, I get this more frequently on the Windows boxes than I do on the Macs. It's usually Explorer that I have to wait on in Windows -- including the Start Menu. On the Mac, it's probably manual window resizing most of the time. I rarely do this though, I generally use the zoom widget which is far superior to Window's maximize widget. Window dragging on the Mac is also faster than on Windows. Well, I guess they're both really the same speed, but Windows takes a while to refresh the screen where the window was and on the Macs that is not a problem.
None of my Macs are new enough to support Quartz Extreme -- my newest Mac was built in 1999. I'd see better performance on the new iBooks due simply to the fact that they have better video cards.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
It seems we have a similar setup. My G3 at work is 300mhz with 576MB Ram.
The G3 serves as my main workstation where I write JSP/servlets with JBuilder5, build web sites with Dreamweaver, and occasionaly edit images with Photoshop.
In all cases this humble machine is fast enough to get the job done.
For comparison I also have a Celeron 600 Win2000 box which I use for testing, and a Celeron 1100 running Mandrake 9 at home. The G3 feels slightly faster than the 600, but is not quite as quick as the 1100.
That is because OS9 is not preemptively multi-tasking. In OS X, the OS is controlling access to the CPU based on priority whereas under OS 9, the program have to cooperatively share the CPU by releasing CPU cycles. As expected, the forground apps with focus will try to be greedy with the CPU under a cooperative multi-tasking environment.
... on a lot of things. Most significantly, available memory (512M & up recommended) and how much of the video processing can be offloaded onto the graphics chip. If you're thinking about one of the LCD iMacs, you're probably OK, although I'd opt for the top-end configuration due to the 32M VRAM vs 16M in lesser configurations.
In my own usage, I'm running OS X 10.2 on a couple of machines: a 384M Powerbook sporting a 500 MHz G4 (a 67 MHz system bus and 8M of VRAM with an ATI 128 LT-Pro graphics chip are the weak knees in this system), and an ancient 7500 (almost 50 MHz system bus, 512M RAM, a 466 MHz G3 card and an ATI VR128 graphics card, which partially supports Quartz).
Clearly, these are marginal machines -- both officially unsupported for OS X (the Powerbook due to the G4 3rd-party upgrade, and the 7500 because, well, just because). Performance is acceptable, but obviously not what you'd call snappy. But definitely not sluggish. The 7500 runs apache, QuickTime Streaming Server (for streamed video/mp3s), does ipforwarding for other machines on the network, concurrently with a logged-on user surfing the web, with the only casualty being pretty slow network performance for the ipforwarded machines -- but then the ethernet port on the 7500 only supports half duplex operation.
OS X goes overboard (IMHO) with the GUI, from rampant transparency to gratuitous animation. At least you can turn off the animation, and I've tried getting rid of the blended layers, but the performance increase was insufficient (but noticable) to justify dorking up the system that much. But the fact that it is doing SO much with the classy presentation means it will always come in second for any kind of graphics -- at least until the graphics processors are able to take over nearly all of the heavy lifting, which they're getting a lot closer to doing. I wouldn't think of attempting OS X gaming on anything but the latest & greatest hardware.
And one should keep in mind that it IS only a bit over a year old. I'd consider it to be late beta quality code at this point, and if they would focus on polishing it and tightening up the code, it would be nice -- but they keep tweaking the architecture. With 10.2.2, the rumor is they're going to toss in a journalled file system, so don't expect lightning disk I/O for a while.
Lastly, it depends upon what you do with it. Virtual PC operation is abysmally slow under OS X as compared to OS 9, but anything done through the terminal window is plenty quick. Web browsing, document manipulation, and most user-oriented tasks work quite well. Being a Mac, photo and video editing are predictably superior to any other platform, and with OS X you can have a boatload of tasks running in the background as well. As a developer platform, it's a fantastic machine.
I bought one of the 500MHz iBooks shortly before the 600Mhz iBooks were released (D'oh!), and it was a bit slow until I stuffed an extra 512M into it. Since then, I've been using it for development work, lots of compiles, lots of testing, and it is just great. My G4 tower is faster, but I do not find myself wishing the iBook was faster when I'm on the road (which is a *lot*, unfortunately - what I find myself wanting is more pixels. :')
I read some interesting benchmarks recently that said large performance can be got by moving your swap file on to a different dedicated partition, or even better on to a seperate hard disk.
Will
per mere, per terras
I have a 733 G4 PowerMac running Jagwire.
Aqua is slow if we compare it to the MacOS 9 or FVWM and other fast alternative window managers for the X Windows.
I also have Red Hat based Yellow Dog Linux running KDE on my machine. It's hard to tell which one is faster, Aqua or KDE, but I surely can tell that neither is blazingly fast nor horribly slow.
On web browsing front Mozilla might be a little sluggish, but I use mostly Chimera which is quite competitive in speed.
Before Jagwire I was quite dissapointed with the speed of OS X, but now it's close to being very decent, although there are still things that need optimization.
What I think would be great to have is a less bloated GUI alternatives supported by Apple. I can't completely trust those 3rd party theme changers knowing the fact that Apple doesn't like Aqua being modified.
-JR
The one time I do notice a lack of zippiness on a Mac is when I thrash the cache. Unfortunely, OSX seems to have a unified buffer+page cache, which means that I/O and virtual memory compete with each other head to head for physical memory. So if you have an app that runs through a gigabyte file, all the programs that weren't running at that time wind up swapped out, and it takes a while to get them back.
This is something Apple could probably fix with some intelligent tuning - it's exactly the same problem Sun had in the early versions of SunOS 4. I do hope they fix it soon - it's a bit of a drag.
Compiling a kernel is hardly stress testing any hardware.
"Oh no, I have to process some text files... better perform stressful operations on my video card, sound system, and network devices!"
Around 90% of the work involved is CPU, while the rest is disk access. That's no stress test, by any measure of the imagination.
Does this box have an NVidia card in it? My XP box bluescreens every once in a while, due to NVidia having their video drivers where no video driver belongs.
the C3: Windows XP seems to have the goal of being more responsive. XP will update windows section by section, or web page image by image. The instant feed back of some kind of progress gives an illusion of speed. This speed can also be seen in games, and intensive applications like playing a DVD in software, or video conversion.
the ibook: Mac OS X on the other hand has the goal of always looking good. This can mean that while its performing a task you cannot do anything. When viewing a new web page the browser will draw in the background and then display it. When switching applications you notice a significantly longer delay as you assume the window is being redrawn. However other minor UI items like the infamous resizing windows look very slow and jerky. The real surprise however is when you run a CPU intensive application like playing a DVD or DivX video in software - it works! Being used to Windows systems you equate such a slow UI with old CPU's that couldn't handle playing full screen video.
conclusion: G3/4 and Pentiums have equivalent raw processing power, but Mac OS X seems to be the slower UI compared to Windows XP.
MacOS X file manager is terribly slow. Try resizing the window. On a 733MHz G4 w/512MB RAM and a GF3 TI 500, you could see the machine struggle to keep up with screen redraws as the window changes. Come to think of it, it feels a lot like Windows XP! Of course, don't take my word for it, I'm very much a minimalist and expect things to be responsive. I take great joy in eliminating the hundreds of items from a normal user's Windows "startup" folder, as well as deleting everything from the "run" registry key...
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
You can tell that OS X is doing well - FUD postings are appearing. A Windows or Linux user feels threatened... suddenly a post appears on Slashdot asking "Is Mac OS X slow?".
Slashdot is always good for a laugh.
Yes OS X is slow. The GUI response has improved in 10.2 but the file IO is very, very slow. The melding of the Mac GUI with the BSD OS is functional but terribly innefficient at the moment. Straight BSD file system tasks are as you would expect, but file IO through the Mac APIs is hideously slow in comparison. The network acess is even worse.
Clock for Clock they are slightly faster than PCs running apps like a postscript renderer. But the fact that PCs now clock 2.5 times faster than the fastest macs means that the machines themselves are also slow in compairison to PCs running windows or Linux.
Switching from our 2.5 Ghz P4 dev machines to the 1.0Ghz G4 machines the difference is startling. The G4 feels dogged. They've got to dump motorola. If these machines were running on a p4 right now the speed difference would be tolerable. Give them another 5 years to get it worked out it should be sweet, but it's a very bumpy road for developers and users at the moment.
Macs are based on Objective-C - that's REALLY slow.
Correction: It is Mac OS X that is based on Objective-C. Linux/PPC systems are (all kernel, all Xfree86 and most of server applications) written on C.
Correction for the correction. The operating system is written in C/C++. The Mac OS X Cocoa Framework is written for Objective-C (and can implement Objective-C++ and Java).
I'm using OS X for half a year now, after having used previous Mac OS's for nearly 15 years. Having said that, I think I can comment a bit about these "sluggishness problems".
:-) The old way in OS 9 was more responsive because it just displayed an outline when you dragged your mouse. As soon as you let it go, the resize was performed once. Even if this took a second, nobody would mind because during the time when the user wanted feedback ("how much will my window cover") the outline was instantaneous. The OS X way certainly looks nicer, but when you wait a second until the window is updated *while dragging with the mouse*, it doesn't feel responsive at all.
Mac OS X is definitely less responsive that OS9 in some respects, but they can be (and will most likely will be) fixed in a future version. Here are some ideas:
- Bringing up a printer dialog on Chimera 0.6 (G4/400) takes roughly 10 seconds. During this time, the OS calculates what it should display, inluding looking for printers, before it shows the dialog. When it is done thinking about it, it finally displays the dialog. During the waiting, you can use other apps, you can sometimes even use other windows of the same app, but you can't interact with your current window. A possible improvement would be to just show the dialog so that the user has control over it again - even though it has not yet finished thinking about it. If there are elements that still need some calculation, show the element greyed out and display a "still calculating on this element" pic besides it
- Preview (the app that displays PDFs and pictures). When you press the down arrow for the next page, it take the app up to 5 seconds to display the next page. During this waiting time, there is no visual indication that the program has aknowledged your command, neither that it is actually busy, nor how long it will take this time. This can of course be easily changed by informing the user
- Finder: Bringing up an info dialog by pressing Cmd-I makes you wait for 2-3 seconds while the info dialog is internally built, then displayed at once. Again, this could be displayed immediately with some infos missing, after which the missing info is calculated and added.
- Resizing (my favorite
Well, that's about it.
I used Mac OS almost exclucivly, from 7.0 to 10.1, and still use it now-and-then. The 7.0 Mac was a Mac TV. My current Apple box is a first edition iMac DV; That's 400 Mhz G3 CPU, 100 MHz system bus, 196 MB RAM, 10 GB 5400 RPM hard disk ATI Rage128 AGP graphics, etc.
Mac OS 10.0 was rather unresponsive in the GUI. I think that most `MacOS is slow' compliants arise therefrom.
10.1 is vastly better. Moving windows around is indistiguishable from realtime (unless you have about 6 or more transparent window stacked atop each other, but when does that happen?). Resizing windows is better than Xfree 4.2.1 on my 686 SiS box.
Overall, the GUI has a feel of great boroqity, but also is very `polished' (exactly the opposite of X, which is crude and almost flemsy in feel). It sort of reminds me of Java. No, not Java programs or coding in Java or whatever, and Java isn't slow. I just always have this weird picture in my head of Java being like some kind of big huge thing that works perfectly and C being this small tiny thing that is far less elegent. I'm weird, though.
It feels, `together', you know? Even though resizing that iTunes window is around 4 frames per second, the way it doesn't flicker at all and the edges blend in with the background and stuff is SO vastly better than my KDE desktop, where you resize something and the decorations move quickly, but everything flickers around and the windows go blank for a moment and stuff.
Anyhoo, for actual computation and stuff it seems fast enough, but all that I do on my Linux box now.
The only reason I still have a Mac is for OmniGraffle, BTW.
I love you, my brother. I am in awe of your immense, throbbing intellect. The very fact that you would grace these pages with your words should humble us all.
Hail to you, dick-face.
Thats very true. And yeah, thats the response I use, force quit. And yeah, it sure is nice it doesnt take down the whole box like good ol classic.
Trouble is, this happens all too often.
I have a client who got a TiBook, fresh from Apple. Brand new, middle grade, 768mb ram, Jag, yada yada.
He calls me up like a week later and says:
"So how come I am spending all this time watching this beach ball spin?"
"Well what are you doing?"
"I have Office open, IE and and Enoutrage, just trying to work, I mean I have tons of memory right?"
"Yeah you do.."
Point is, this box was fresh from Apple. I taught him how to force quit. Point being, why should you have to do it all the time?
I thought it "just works"?
Must be the same Apple lies like the one in the switch campaign that says you cant do digital audio or video on a PC.
yeah OK..
Are you trying to imply that all Mac users know how to do is use Photoshop?
Mac users=smelly homosexual hippies
Ammo takes up space, adds weight, and eventually runs out. Additionally, unless your 'mech is using an ammo POD, any shot that breaches armor and does internal damage to locations the ammo is stored in has the chance of getting a critical hit and thus denoating the ammo and removing that section of your mech. However, energy weapons build up quite a bit of heat; 20 or 25 heat for a PPC or Extended Range ERPPC variant. Firing a Gauss Rifle builds about 2 heat. Heat sinks required to dissipate said heat also take up space, add some weight, and run the risk of being crit'd.
So really, it's a toss up between a PPC and a Gauss Rifle. My favorite Inner Sphere strike 'mech was a version of the Falconer that had an ERPPC on the left arm, and a Gauss Rifle on the right arm.
Now a
Sorry, I'm gonna have to go with a PPC over a
I'm a mac user and have been since 1999. I've got a PowerMac 9600 with a Sonnet 800mhz G4 upgrade card, radeon 7000, and 1.5gb of ram.
:)
I bought a Mac for the music applications, and I recently plunked down over $500 on the 800mhz upgrade and radeon 7000 just so I could run OSX. I was less than impressed. It runs Jaguar half decent I suppose, but for christs sake its got an 800mhz G4 and 1.5GB of ram!
I'm not cutting down on macs here when I say this, but if you want speed, buy a PC. If you want a pretty interface that isn't slow, buy a PC and install Windowblinds. I wasn't even impressed with Jaguar on my friend's Quicksilver dual 800, and he paid over $3500 for it new about a year ago.
If you want ease of use, all the good audio apps running natively, or you use photoshop a lot, buy a mac. If you want a good machine for your not-so-computer saavy girlfriend or grandmother to use, buy them a used mac.
If you're concerned about stability or security, buy a PC and install Linux, or learn how to secure a Win2k box.
PowerPCs are slow. Aqua is SLOW.
The OS and GUI still don't have enough keyboard shortcuts for my tastes - or maybe they do and they're just too easy for me to figure out
As a PC user, I don't dream of Anti-Aliased windows, fading, shadows, zooming or window effects. I've got all of that. I also have a highly customized interface (something OS X lacks), on my Athlon 900mhz with 256mb of PC133 ram with a $100 Radeon 8500 LE and WindowFX by Stardock. You could buy a comparable machine at newegg.com for less than $800, put a little time into customizing the interface under WindowsXP, and do everything a mac does for a 1/4 of the price.
Really, unless you have a specific need for a Mac, I still think for the money a PC is your best bet, speed or otherwise.
Theres a lot of FUD being tossed around on both sides. My advice is to just use both and decide what your needs are. In the end, its your money, and you're going to have to live with whatever you end up buying.
Since the original question is asked by a MAC OS X user, I am not sure if it really should deserve an answer. However, since I am a MAC OS X user, I suppose that I feel somewhat obligated to share my experience.
Frankly, I love my MAC OS X. The comparison on the CPU cycles is not a fair comparision due to major architectural diffirences between x86 and PPC. I migrated over from a Linux x86 based system. There are some performance diffirences from x86 Linux based GUIs such as Gnome, KDE, WindowMaker, and my favorite Enlightenment when compared to the Quartz GUI on MAC OS X. Most of the differences are simply based that the MAC OS X GUI was designed to create a simple interface for non-technical savvy users. This is one of the very reasons MACs are popular amongst most other non-UNIX users.
I have found the leap in the GUI from the prepackaged Linux GUIs on MAC OS X to be a gigantic progress for *NIX based GUIs. It is pretty look at it. It is simple. Maybe a bit slower than other GUIs but it is stable.
If your concern is just performance. Strip Quartz from your PowerBook and try a pure Darwin installation. You will find the pure speed and performance that you are used to seeing in BSD. Otherwise, shut up about performance and bask in the glow of your most advanced *nix based GUI (That is my opinion).
kha0z
Master of ImportChaos.com
4) I can install or remove RAM in less than 5 seconds on any powermac.
And boy will you need to, with OS X's ram needs!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I realize you're explicitly not asking this question, but I can say that a $2500 G4 + $300 in RAM is very quick. The dual processors seem to allow it to maintain responsiveness even under a good bit of load. I haven't stressed it heavily yet (still learning the system), but I'd call it roughly comparable to my Athlon 1900+ running Windows 2K.
:-)
If I understood correctly what I read in the Missing Manual for OSX (decent book, but aimed more at Mac OS 9 users than at Unix geeks), each Quartz window actually allocates enough RAM to fill the screen. This means that running multiple apps will drain your RAM a little faster than you might otherwise expect, especially on a big monitor.
I have a friend with an iMac (the one with the 17" widescreen), and he's quite happy with it. He's a Linux geek from way back, and says it's similar to his 1.5ghz P4 system. I *think* he expanded his RAM too, but I'm not certain.
On my system, with 1.25gb of memory, I don't think I've ever seen it go much below 750MB free. But I'm not doing all that much with it yet. I don't have any commercial apps running, just the stuff that comes with it and the vast library of open source stuff that I'm used to. I would guess that 512MB would probably be very comfortable for normal use, 768MB if you're running lots at once.
The only app I've run that seems slow is Angband Carbon.... the screen updates on that application are rather sluggish. I haven't tried compiling the X Windows version yet, but I'll bet almost anything it's faster. I don't think Carbon is very efficient. Oh.... I almost forgot. MacMame is DIRT SLOW on this machine. It's also Carbonized. Probably not a coincidence. OS X will run Carbon apps, but I don't remember seeing anything about it running Carbon apps *well*.
In essence, starting from scratch on 10.2 on a new system, I have no speed complaints at all. The machine doesn't dazzle me. I wouldn't describe it as 'lightning quick', but it would never have occurred to me to call it slow, either. Hopefully you can extrapolate down from there to iMac level.
They wanted to know if MacOS seemed slow to the users on mid-range macs. Not if it would be 'theoretically fast' based on the technology.
Basically what they really need to know is 'interface latency'. How long between when you click and when something happens. Things like Vector engines are not going to help this.
While the P4/Athlon and (I assume) G4 can all run more then one instruction at once (not just one) that's irrelevant, what is being asked here is if the OS is slow for the hardware it's running on. Win95 would be blazing fast on a p3-500 with 128 megs of ram, but XP would run like a hog on the same machine.
Since I seriously doubt anyone has any kind of actual measurements this is basically going to be nothing more then a page-view generating flamewar on slashdot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I originally ran OS X on my Beige G3 (300 Mhz, 128 Meg RAM) and it was DOG slow.
I have since upgraded to a 450 MHz G4 CPU, and that pepped things up a bit - but the REAL kicker was going up to 256 Meg of RAM. You need AT LEAST 256 megs of RAM to run OS X reasonably fast.
The effect was so dramatic, I kicked up the RAM to 640 Meg.
Performance is adequate, and if it weren't for the fact that the Beige G3 platform itself wasn't obsoleted by OS X (crappy ADB and SCSI support, no support for Quartz Extreme), I wouldn't even be considering replacing it. But this machine will still be serving me for many years to come.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I did and you're right.
Just a note that K-Meleon is alive and well, they just released version 0.7. It is based on Mozilla 1.2b. More info at the K-Meleon page.
I've got a 500Mhz TiBook, 1Gb RAM. The interface, at times, is a bit slow. TheGUI seems to have to go through an ounce or two of weed (smokingly fast! ...NOT) to deal with disk I/O. That spinning rainbow CD icon pops up every now and then, and while it's certainly not unbearable, it is annoying and I've never experienced anything like it on Win2K.
A specific benchmark example of speed: Using FileMaker Pro 6.0v3 (which is amazingly crappy on OSX despite FMI being an Apple subsidiary), I'm testing the migration to a new build of databases. Note that in OS9, you have to manually allocate the max amount of memory FMP can use (40Mb); it doesn't use any more in OSX (I did say it's a POS already, didn't I?), but at least it doesn't need manually tweaked.
OS9.2.1 on a 500Mhz G3 iMac with 256Mb or Ram, it takes 45 minutes to clear test import data from the database set and close the application (it has to remove unused blocks). Then on a fresh import run, it takes about 1.5 hrs to import new data into the database set.
OSX 10.2.1 on my 500Mhz G4 TiBook with 1Gb RAM, it takes about 1 minute (vs 45 minutes) to clear data from the database set and quit the application. Then, it takes about 1.5 hrs to import new data back into the database set.
But...
The core OS seems really fucking fast, and amazinly functional, to me. I run Apache/PHP/MySQL on my TiBook, and can copy files off our Linux server and they *just work* on my TiBook. I can take our entire corporate web environment mobile in a matter of minutes. I switch between single and dual monitor mode all the time, and there's never a problem. I end up changing between 3-4 network configurations all the time, and it *just works*. I've set my laptop up, wireless and running off battery, in my kid's room running a DVD, and I can go to our other computer (an old 604e Mac), mount the laptop's volume, and do web development work, hitting the Apache/PHP/MySQL environment on the laptop, while the thing plays a DVD flawlessly. And it's not like the thing chokes trying to serve files via HTTP *and* handle BBEdit chewing on the files over the network at the same time.
I've been running 10.2.1 since the beginning of October; the system has not crashed or needed rebooting - not even once - except for when application or update installs require it. I've never seen *any* other laptop handle all this - Windows or OS9 - without the need for constant reboots and/or system crashes.
So, blah blah blah, YES, OSX is SLIGHLTLY SLOWER. Enough that I can notice it. But it is *so* much more stable, and more functional than anything else out there, windows or OS9, that I'll take the trade-off.
Oh, and I'll be getting myself one of those new 1Ghz TiBooks with the SuperDrive pretty soon! Now I won't have to copy the cheezy little movies I create to a co-worker's flat-panel iMac to burn DVD's.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
That's just plain silly.
:-)
:-)
:-) But that's neither OS 9's fault, though.
I have OS 9.1 on a 250 MHz Powermac 6500 with 128 Mb RAM, and it just loads and runs, not "crawls".
DOH! It's just a little program!
How do you expect something that fits on a 150 MB (and that's including Microsnot Internet Exploder and other goodies!) SCSI disk to be slow, especially when it only lacks 22 Mb to stuff the *entire* OS disk on the RAM in the first place?
Like the AmigaOS, that fitted easily on a 8 MB partition, MacOS 9.1 still feels like a very small system shell in many ways not unlike GEOS/C64 (OK THAT was slow), or DOS on steroids: fast -- and easy to program around. Which is proven by the fact that MacOS 9.1 is only used to boot my Mac into Linux 90% of the time
It sometimes seems OSes become huge and nonunderstandable at the very same point they introduce memory protection for them. (I believe that even counts for Win 3.1 -> 95?)
Anyway, jumping right into kernel memory has always been much more fun than this stupid system call trapping!
Back to topic: yes, my Mac takes ages to boot up. That's because it waits for network disks that are never available. That's my fault, I should remove that one of these days. If you have a problem like that, that's not my fault
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
I see a lot of people here saying "Slow? No way, it's much faster than MacOS 9". Well, that's not the point. All that proves is that OS 9 was terribly slow. This article is about OS X compared to Windows 2000 / XP or Linux, on a similarly priced machine. And in my experience, OS X is significantly slower than any of those, except possibly XP with all the bells & whistles turned on. But in XP you can pretty much turn it all off, in OS X it's not so simple. True, version .2 helped, but it still feels "laggy" sometimes (for ex., my 500 MHz Pentium III loads MS Word in 3 seconds; on the Mac it takes about 10).
I think that Ma
[Out of memory]
It rocks. Buy one. You'll be happy.
I could easily become addicted to tabbed browsing. I usually open links in a new tab, and switch back to the original while waiting a page load (very nice, especially when a site is being cruched under the load of a good Slashdotting).
It'd be perfect if someone would tell me the keyboard shortcut for switching between tabs... Please tell me that such a shortcut exists...
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
I can even watch a normal-sized (~320x240) DivX movie full-screen with very few dropped frames.
>>>>>>>>>>>.
On a 500 MHz G3! I could play full screen DivXs on my P2-300 while playing a couple of MP3s in the background! And that was on Windows! Don't even get me started on BeOS!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
OK, if you want a faster OS, there are several
things that you (or Apple, or Sun, or Microsoft)
can do.
First, the easy way out. Get a faster CPU. That
tends to be the current trend.
Second, optimize. That big, honkin' GUI you have
running is written is a highly inefficient
language like C++ or Java or C#. Profile the
OS, find the parts that can be replaced with
lower language (but more efficient) code, and
do it. Make it better; avoid improving by
just throwing more features at it. Sure, doing
this is hard; but this is the OS, not a damned
application!
Look at an OS like QNX. Small, fast, efficient;
but has zero percent penetration in the market.
But it fits on a floppy! Amazing!
Of course, this is all moot because the OS
people will just continue to do creeping
featuritis, and slow things down even further.
So will just leave it to the CPU manufacturers
to build us faster (and hotter, and more power
hungery) chips to keep up with our desires.
Oh, well.
A 75mhz machine cant possibly be m68k, it MUST be ppc... why? simple.. the fastest m68k processor is the 50mhz 68060, there *might* be a 66mhz version but no higher than that... and the 66mhz accelerator cards for amiga systems usually had overclocked 50mhz chips on them.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I bet the app was already running but didn't have any windows open... although I guess that's basically what IE for Windows does...
I spend at least 4 to 5 hours per day coding with project builder on OS X. What I've noticed is that it is VERY slow, at certain things. Most notably, compiling obj-c, or even worse, obj-c++ code.
My project is about 10K lines of code, 5k of them are in cpp files the other 5k in mm (obj-c++). Doing a clean build of the cpp stuff takes under a minute, easily. Doing a clean compile of the obj-c++ code takes no less than 8 minutes.
RAM. RAM is good. On a 500MHz G3 "old style" iMac, bumping the RAM from 128MB to 256MB made a noticable difference in switching between windows and launching apps (10.1). Adding more RAM, up to 640MB, was even better. Bottom line- Quit being cheap and get RAM. Apple doesn't bundle enough. Just buy some since it's cheap and easy to install, and it'll make your world a lot simpler (and faster).
My wife's ibook 700 was pretty unbearably slow with OS X 10.2 . Blowing an extra $125 on 512MB of RAM fixed it real quick, though. It's a shame they come with 128MB standard, that really isn't enough.
Last login: Thu Nov 7 10:36:03 from 130.199.52.23
Welcome to Darwin!
[ool-18bc17dc:~] jnied% uptime
8:15PM up 5 days, 5:48, 2 users, load averages: 0.27, 0.31, 0.31
[ool-18bc17dc:~] jnied%
point being, you should just put the sucker to sleep at night...it wakes up and is ready to go in ~10 seconds. do you ever switch off your linux box? then why the osX box?
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
In the computer labs here at the U of Michigan, we use 400 (or 450, I'm not sure) MHz G4s with OSX 10.1 and 1.8 GHz Dell Optiplex GX240s with Win2K.
The Win boxes take about 20 seconds to log in. The Macs take about 50 secs - 1 minute. Apparently, it's not just megahertz myth...it's network thoroughput as well...?
The Mac boxes are slower at loading most programs too. No specifics ('cept maybe IE), but it's just something that's consciously noticable.
We're at a very interesting time in OSs now. While Windows is still getting slower everyday (XP killed all the nice things that started with Win2K) the other two big OSs, Linux and OS X are getting faster everyday. KDE 3.x is faster than KDE 2.x to the point where it's even usable for me, and it has tons more features. OS X 10.2 has a lot more features than OS X 10.0, but is a lot faster. The only time I've ever seen this before was with BeOS. And honestly, it makes sense. Adding new features, generally, needn't have any effect on performance other than on memory usage. Adding a better file search, for example, shouldn't effect how long it takes to display my emails, not if the program is well designed. Hopefully, this trend continues. Hopefully, KDE 4.x on my 2GHz, 640MB P4 will finally match BeOS 4.5 on my 300 MHz 64MB P2...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I recently got fed up with my windoze box crashes and got a PowerMac G4 733 with OS X 10.2. The switchover was much easier than I expected, but the thing is dog slow. It has 640M memory, but I added another 512M. That helped, but even then it still was a lot slower than my windoze box. Granted, it's a 1.8Ghz system, but that's the point: you can argue about exact equivalencies, but you double the clock rate and it's going to be a lot faster. Period.
Those responsible for the previous corrections have been sacked. :)
Let us not forget that Cocoa can be used from C++ and Carbon from Obj-C - and that you can always just use plain C or C++ and Carbon if your application absolutely cannot waste time on dynamic type checking. I've gotten fond of Cocoa lately, but I'm working on an audio application that needs almost ridicuously low latency, so I have to have fairly fast callbacks - so I'm doing it in Carbon. The extra pain in the GUI is worth the performance for this case, altho it may not be so for all things.
Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. That's just the way it is. Sometimes Nautilus and GNOME felt faster under Debian than the Finder and OSX do.
Different applications behave different ways. For instance, on a 700MHz G4 iMac w/768MB of RAM, Photoshop Elements running under classic feels more responsive than Photoshop for OSX.
The move from Puma (10.1) to Jaguar made my PowerBook G3 feel slower in many ways. I'm not sure why though. But that's just the way it feels to me.
As for the interface, if you've got a newer mac and have the ability to use QuartzExtreme it's quite zippy indeed.
Gabriel Ricard
It is fair to argue:
.Mac account in your address book, Mail puts a little green dot beside their name in your In Box. So when you are reading mail and you need to send a response or ask a question, you can save time by clicking the person's green dot and launching an iChat session, which gets your conversation over with without waiting on e-mails back and forth that might pile up in the inbox they or you are ignoring.
*** the design of the applications is just as important a "speed factor" as is the clock cycles.
My *400 Mhz* PowerBook Ti is very responsive but I get even MORE done because of the design of applications - things that Windows and Linux lack. Here is an example:
When using Mail, if someone sent you an e-mail and is in your address book and also has an AOL or
That gets my work done faster because OS X and the applications that run on it are, for the most part, more thoughfully designed. Sure you COULD implement this on Linux or XP, but no one has. Apple DID...and continues to...and that makes the difference.
Stop fighting it and switch
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Mac OS X is DEFINITELY slower than any other operating system I've ever used. I've used a few flavors of Linux, Windows 95, 98, Me, and XP, and Mac OS 7.1 through 9.2.2. BUT! Here's why: - unaccelerated video. The poor widdle CPU has to do EVERY bit of graphics on the screen. For the past, oh, decade and a half, the graphics card would do the QuickDraw commands. Now, the CPU has to do it all, and this means slower graphics *and* slower everything else - PDF graphics. This one hurts. Suddenly everything on the screen is a PDF. That's fine and powerful and all, but PDF is historically slow. And it'll be a few years until video cards get to render the PDF natively. No, Quartz Extreme doesn't count, it only means the vid card does compositing, but not rendering. - There's some flap about the kernel being designed for 68k and it can't be fixed without requiring a recompile of everything. Personally, I'll take a 10-12% performance gain even if the price is updating *all* of my apps. This will probably happen by 10.5, once the shock of Carbonizing everything has faded into memory. - Immaturity. The OS is still very very young. It doesn't have the years and years of optimization work that's gone into every other operating system. Furthermore, Apple is too busy getting it out the door to make it fast. Hopefully they can take a break from adding features, and make 10.3 a blazing fast 10.2 - G3 processors just suck. AltiVec is now a must-have. Trust me. I have a 700 G3 iMac (CRT). My father has an 800 G4 TiBook. It kicks my iMac's ass. WAY more than can be accounted for by 100mhz in bus speed, or a better gfx card, or vagaries of busses. It BLOWS my g3 AWAY. I'm going to ask for a G4 for Christmas - no, demand! My iMac is a year and a half old and already it feels crappy. I'd rather be ahead of the curve than behind it. And at least I get Quartz Extreme and such to soothe the pain until Apple really fixes OS X.
Save time now so you can waste it later
Maybe your memory cache for caching files under OS9 was small. Next time, go to the Memory control panel. 32kb is the minimum setting, I believe, which puts OS9 into a crawl.
OK, since the original post was asking us Apple users about operations that seem faster/slower than on other systems here are my 2cents.
I'm running 10.2.1 on an old, creaky original 233Mhz G3 and it suits my needs just fine. I had a much faster G3 once, but that belonged to the company I was working for before the crash.
As a web designer by profession, Macs seem to run all the "required" software as fast or faster than the Wintel boxen I've used. (Required: Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe and Macromedia products.) I wasn't paying much attention to Mhz or anything else - it was just whatever machines were available, some new some old.
When you get under the hood (aka Unix command line) it's as fast as most of the Sun/Solaris boxen I've used.
I suspect that there's a lot of unoptimized software out there - on MacOS X both IE and Netscape are dog slow downloading via an HTTP connection. About 100 times slower than using wget from the command line on the same machine.
It's like...
...real fast.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Perhaps it's because I have been spoiled by the responsiveness of the BeOS, but I don't think there should be a framerate for resizing a window, or scrolling through the contents of an open window! I shouldn't need an 800MHz+ computer to smoothly drop a menu down for me!
-sigh- But instead Apple went with Form being more important that Function. With the BeOS, I got both - a beautiful OS that was lightning-quick.
And yes, MacOSX v. 10.2 is fairly speedy, but only on the latest hardware! But the BeOS on my 200MHz 604e Power Mac can easily run circles around MacOS X on even the latest hardware.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
OS X UI performance also largely depends on your graphics cards 3D support and your AGP bus bandwidth. So I don't think its possible to say that OS X has 85-90% of Linux performance on the same hardware. Scrolling on OS X is extremely slow. I don't understand why this is. Note that OS X runs much faster on a 400MHz G4 than it does on a 500MHz G3. The difference is simply incredible.
No kernel panic since 10.1.
Nice fast OS on 600MHz iBook.
Like I said: OS X on my G3 is slow.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Other topics that are perfect for objective debate such as:
Is Emacs slow?
Is vi easy to use?
Is perl a good language?
Do you like RMS?
Is your mother ugly?
Is Christianity the best religion?
Cowboy Neal?
When Apple was perfecting their first GUI, they realized that they could manipulate user perceptions of how fast the system was going by increasing the sensitivity on keystrokes and mouse response.
Unfortunately, they seemed to forget this along the way. I use both XP and 10.2 and find I generally work faster on XP for the sheer reason that I can make the mouse a lot more sensitive! I have dual monitors on my mac, both at 1600x1200, and it takes 3 lift-up put-downs of the optical mouse, with the senstivity put all the way up. Now on my PC with dual monitors, I can traverse the whole screen(s) quickly with one motion. The same is true of highlighting and text input. Highlighting things in 10.2 seems laborious, slow and unresponsive. Type text in also --- if they'd just speed everything up it would greatly warm perceptions around.
Quadruple the processor speed, octuple the RAM, and widen the FSB by a factor of 100.
Then the OS shouldn't be slow anymore.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Overall, I don't think that given machine running OS X is slow, but on some things it seems to be absolutely DEAD.
I must preface this by the computers I've used:
Mac OS X:
G4 Cube @ 400 MHz
Brand-new-iMac @ something
OS 9:
Macintosh 512k - up
Linux:
Pentium 133 and up
DOS/Win:
386DX-20 and up
by 'up', I mean all the way to the New Hotness machines.
I think that OS X has _serious_ filesystem problems, HFS+ is a little faster, but for my use, worthless. Yesterday I installed xfree86 from a tgz package (our system) on the new iMac, and it took over 10 minutes. On linux, that only takes a minute or two. Application launches like XDarwin take forever. I have been happy, though, with image rendering and web rendering, and Quartz Extreme is pretty nice, although nothing can compare to linux (icewm & 4.2.1) for response.
I have been running the CPU monitor app and it is hardly ever at 100%, so disk I/O is probably to blame.
Side note: anyone notice that fsck dies with a 'Bus Error' sometimes, and then, ironically, your installation is f*cked.
I thought that macintosh just refered to the operating system, not the Apple hardware. So you cannot have Gentoo installed on a mac (unless it is running in an emulator) but you can have gentoo installed on apple hardware.
This is what I've always thought at least. I may be wrong!
I have a G3 400mhz B&W ppc running Jaguar. Its horribly slow at some tasks, and fantastically fast at others. I find its very slow during graphics redraws, even with Quartz Extreme activated on my PCI Radeon 7000. For example, a lesser PC (my 300mhz laptop running Win2000) running internet explorer will redraw scrolling pages much much (scientific calculation :) ) faster than my mac. On the other hand, I can seem to run more applications with less slowdown on my mac. I figure the graphics slowdown is due to the fact that just about everything on the desktop is vector, dynamic resizing etc, everything is skinned. I compare it to running Enlightenment with a really really heavy theme. Not to mention all text on the screen is very very antialiased.
oh well..
Not in my experience. The processor speed might look slower, but damn, this thing is faster than my Lintel box that fried
It's been my experience that the more cache the system has, the better overall performance you'll get, including UI elements and I/O.
I have a year 2000 PowerBook G3, which has been upgraded to a G4. It has 1MB of backside L2 cache, running at 220MHz. The CPU runs at 500MHz.
I also have an iMac G4/800. It has 256KB of on-chip cache running at 800MHz.
My girlfriend has a Dual G4/867 "Windtunnel" PowerMac. It has 256KB of L2 cache on each CPU running at 867MHz and 1MB of DDR L3 cache (not sure at what speed the cache runs).
Side by side tests, using Chimera, show that the PowerBook is nearly as fast as the iMac, even though the iMac has a 300MHz speed advantage. The dual 867 stomps both easily, and is MUCH faster than the iMac, and way more responsive. Both the iMac and PowerMac have 512MB of RAM. The PowerBook has 384MB. My conclusion so far has been that the iMac's CPU is just starved for data. If it had a 512KB L3 or 1MB L3 cache, it'd probably be significantly faster. I can only hope Apple will do something about it in the future.
Aqua takes up too much power. Change themes and you will see a very big speed increase. I am on a 933 with a gig of Ram and I noticed a large increase. Theme switcher @ http://conundrumsoft.com/Products/ Themes @ http://planeta.terra.com.br/informatica/MacMotiva/ themes.html
http://homepage.mac.com/max_08/index_themes.htm
My OSX looks like Xp but it is MUCH faster, and more responsive. The titanium theme also looks great.
Alright lets go over this. What determines speed of your computer. well lots of things: Proc Speed: how many cycles in 1 second, how fast it can handle process in 1 cycle. Faster the speed the more it can handle. Proc Bits: How many lanes of trafic. 32 64 128. well 32 bit can push 32 bits at once to the proc where as 64 can push 64 and 128, 128. As you guessed the more bits the more information. New macs are 128 bit. PC's are usually 32 and some are 64. Proc Arcetechure: RISc or CISc, RISc is a reduced instruction set chip(is that correct). And it takes less instructions for the basic things. Like adding. Yet for more complex things it takes a few more. CISc is a Complex Instruction Set chip. This thing takes more complex approches twords simple things. yet it can do more complex things with greater ease. Mac uses risc. a Pc generally cisc. Front Side Bus (FSB): FBS is the connection between the CPU, memory and other stuff (ie agp and pci buses). The FBS is used to figure the multiplier for you CPU. Divide MHZ/FSB and get your mulitplier. Macs are generlly good systems. Can't really build them your self. and fora good reason. To enforce compatibility. Xbrand may not be compatibal with Ybrand on a PC. but mac steers away from that. Although if you tried hard you can build a mac from scratch. The OS is very very solid. Unlike windows. I dont know much about the os other than the basis of the kernal. BSD 4.4. PC windows has been getting better, not all that much faster but better. Thats about all i can say. TURN OF THE PRETTY GUI for speed increase
...that doesn't fix the horrid piles of ass that are Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver MX. :(
:(
I've been to the unsanity site, and it looks like cool stuff- but unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that I can just keep my powerbook in OS 9.... and keep finder labels and window shading without having to pay for them.
On my beige G3/466 with 640 MB, but just 6 MB video RAM, OS X.2 "feels" about the same as 9.1 at the Finder level, but iMovie playback is noticeably choppier. I'd blame that on the slow graphics on this machine. However, it runs alot better on this machine than I'd expect XP to run on a four year old PC!
Anyway, speed isn't everything - I still prefer to use my old Mac for most things than my 1.7 GHz Xeon with 1 GB and Win2000 (shame it won't run OS X). Maybe the Windows machine is 10 times faster, but I'm faster using MacOS than Windows. Then again, Autodesk Inventor is a blast on the Xeon!
Your conclusion is correct: a PPC is better then a .357. However there are some technical errors.
The PPC (IS) produces 10 heat, the ERPPC (Clan/IS) produces 15. The Clan ERPPC does 15 damage. The IS PPC, and ERPPC both do 10 damage. The Guass Rifle produces 1 heat, and does 15 damage.
Guass rifle ammo is a nickel-ferrous slug. The guass rifle ammo does not explode if it takes a critical hit. However if the gauss rifle itself takes a critical hit the power capacitors will explode doing 20 points of damage. It is not specifically stated if a guass rifle is caseable.
The PPC can be installed in mechs less then 45 tons. The Inner Sphere PPCs weight 7 tons and could be put in a 20 ton mech. Although the resulting mech would have 6/9 movement, and only 2 tons of armour. It would not be the most practical of mechs. A more usefull mech may be a 30 tons Urbanmech with PPC. The reliable 35 tons PNT-6R Panther of the Draconis Combine is actually equiped with a PPC on the right arm. Along with its SRM 4, 4 tons of armour, and 4/6/4 movement the Panther is a capable mech.
As a Clan ERPPC only weights 6 tons, and all Clan tech is lighter and cheesier then IS tech, a 20 or 25 tons clan mech could easily support a PPC. A 25 tons Clanner with, XL engine, endo steel, 67 points of ferro-fibrous armour, and double efficiency heat sinks could streak around the field at 7/11/6 with an ER PPC, two ER Medium Lasers, and an ER Small Laser.
In comparing my 800Mhz eMac to my 1.4Ghz Athlon home built running Windows XP Pro, I would say the machines are roughly equal. The Mac is slow in some instances but then so is the PC. There is one instance the the Mac has won in so far. MacOSX has never crashed on me, not once! I wish I could say the Windows could make this claim. Most apps that I run, QuarkXpress, Indesign, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and the lot are still about the same on both platforms. MacOSX could use a speed boost in some areas, but then so could windows!
I've been a Mac user for a long time. Yes, OS X is a little slower in some respects; but when you consider all the saved time from never having to close all your apps and restart the machine every time something decides to crash, the SLIGHT delays are no big deal. AND remember when we say it is a little slow, that doesn't mean that it's terribly slow .. just a little slower than OS 9 in some ways.
However, during the latter part of the Spindler era, some truly god-awful PPC Performas came out. This poisoned the Performa name. I'm not sure if Steve killed the Performa designation or his immediate predecessor, but by the time it was killed nobody took the Performa seriously anymore and nobody shed tears over the designation's demise.
Actually there were a few Performas that kicked serious ass in their day. Gotta love that low-slung case. Vroom.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I have a 800MHz G4 TiBook, and it runs quite nicely, thank you. It could certainly be faster, and I have no idea how much of that is caused by the application, the OS, or the hardware.
What I *do* find annoying, and what slows me down no-end, is the fact that the GUI is click-to-focus, and autoraises windows.
When I am running with two monitors, and I have an application on the second screen, I don't appreciate having to move the mouse pointer and my head, in order to access the menu for that application, which is still stuck on the first screen.
APPLE: put the menus back where they belong - with the application windows! (or at least make it an option) - that's solve the problem stopping focus-follows-mouse too.
Even Microsoft 'allows' you to have 'focus-follows-mouse'...
Sigh.
Max.
The interface is slow... the kernal is slow... fine and dandy but how about some numbers. First the systems TiBook 800, iBook 500? (it is at work and I forget precisely), G4 tower 400, G3 Desktop 300, Apple 7300 (200 mhz). All system have maximum amount of memory accessible by the hardware/installable in given slots.
Now two observations 1 Darwin no longer runs on the 7300. I have used this box as a database server and had good results. Apple fix this. Second the G3 systems are noticably slower as far as windowing.
Now is MacOS X slow? Yes as far as accessing memory. No as far as crunching numbers. And Yes as far as the window server is concerned. Yes as far as running OS 9 native apps is concerned, and yes as far as running anything that is not built on the Objective C Cocoa API's.
Data
MySQL look ups take longer on the TiBook (fastest system) than my Athalon Ghz system running Linux (Red Hat 7), but just slightly as in the difference is less than my reaction time at a console window, note I realize this is not a valid test, and have watched processor time and observed the macintosh to take about 1.3 times the time of the pc to do the same query and exit as on the macintosh using a cloned database.
Crunching numbers using altivec accelerated code (simple data analysis on large amounts of data) the Mac wins the G4 400 is roughly equivalent to the Athalon and the Ti Book runs a process that takes 30 sec on the PC in about 23 seconds. Sorry I can't distribute code.
Is the window server really slow? I don't think slow comparing the TiBook to a coworker's Dell laptop (the tiBook has an impressively better screen) running XP. but I would like to see some method of comparison. Notably the G4 400 running 10.2 has issues, Quartz Extreme is not supported on this machine and thus this machine is noticably slower refreshing the screen and drawing windows. I believe 10.1.5 is actually faster on the four systems that run it. But can't prove it with numbers.
Those are the numbers. To summarize, use native applications Omniweb is a great browser, or write your own, Cocoa is much easier than programming for X. Provide your Mac with plenty of memory (but same goes for XP, Linux, and BeOS). And if you really want to play games buy a GameCube or Playstation. And write Apple and tell them to fix bugs, post more of the Operating System as Open Source, adding hardware support, to encourage Cocoa not Carbon (doesn't help that that Apple uses the "Carbon" code name for the API derived from Classic and for the General API for OS X including Cocoa") and not focus on adding features.
Oh and in case anyone had any doubts I have been a Macintosh user since my LC in 1989,and I happen to enjoy being a Macintosh Zealot.
Yes, OS 10.1.5 on a PB550MHz w/384MB RAM is slow.
I have seen way more of that spinning beachball than i ever want to, find it difficult to use the finder because it's so slow with folders that contain more than 100 items, and am generally unimpressed with the the sluggish way the GUI behaves.
Practically any Pentium 2+ class Linux or Windows machine with 128MB of RAM or more would run circles around this machine for surfing the web/managing files/folders etc.
Mozilla is so slow under OS X that i find it a much nicer experience browsing the web via mozilla running on an x86 machine under X-Windows.
Really, the Aqua GUI is not very attractive after the first 2 'woo gee whiz' days, and quickly becomes just plain annoying.
I hate the animated window effects, and the general sluggishness of the whole desktop, along with the way that i tend to accumulate about 20 seemingly identical whitish scaled-down window icons in the dock, which makes it hard to identify which window i want to switch to.
I thought Apple would have preserved the kind of slickness and usability i had come to expect from my (admittedly minimal) use of OS9, but I was wrong. I won't be buying another Mac, at least not to run OS X on.
OS X has it's good points, but it has (in my opinion) an unacceptably slow GUI, and deserves all the bashing it gets for it.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Well, there's a couple of ways to look at it. If you look at raw benchmarks on the kernel, IIRC linux is faster. By a lot in some places, not at all in other places, but overall.
... the biggest speedup was for people who've got the latest video chipsets with 32 or more begs of VRAM. I don't have that personally but the people who says "WOW 10.2 is so fast!" all seem to have the latest machines.
RAM has a big effect. Personally, I'm running 10.2 on a TiBook and the only time I notice it getting slow is when it starts hitting the swap file. That only happens when I run classic (almost never) or photoshop (well, rarely, because GraphicConverter is almost as good). I've only got 256 ram so I think I'm pretty behind in that regard.
Then there's the whole speedup in 10.2
File system performance improved dramatically with 10.2 I noticed. It used to take forever to rm -rf a few thousand files; now it's pretty quick, I haven't had to wait since I upgraded. That's nice.
Someone else brought up the whole issue of availability. The OS is responsive even when the spinning colour ball is going. That's just the local app being unresponsive. A lot of people don't realize you can just click to some other app and keep working until whatever is finished.
Internet Explorer is slow. But chimera is not slow. It's very fast. I'm not going back.
simon
home page
Please lobby your local school board to get this fine oral tradition transcribed into some course (coarse?) material for our kids to learn before it's too late!
Well, I can say that I have Micro$oft .NET Enterprise Server installed in a Pentium Pro 200 machine and the boy can run. It actually feels pretty good. Then again, this is with virtual zero load. Still, it feels almost as fast as Linux. Then again, once loaded everything might change.
which means it only runs on expensive custom hardware
Don't confuse ``expensive custom hardware'' with ``hardware I don't have.'' Most of the arguments I've seen/had with people have basically boiled down to, ``I wish Apple would make this work on my computer so I can have this great product without giving them any of my money.'' Um, no.
It's interesting that OSX is more useful as a desktop Unix than Linux is (for the non-technically-inclined user, someone who may be technically competent but not used to ripping things apart and making them work when they're broken)
I haven't seriously used Linux in five or six years (well, I got a new job recently and I have to use it at work), but I consider myself a fairly technically inclined user. My previous desktop machines have always been SGI or NetBSD. I've been managing clusters of Solaris machines up until I became a full-time software developer. Now, I sit on my OS X box and write code in any of python, C, objective C, java, smalltalk, scheme, etc... (I've got a lot of projects). It is definitely the most useful desktop for me (even if I do spend most of my time in the X server).
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
If you want to run a xNIX on a G3 or lower run Yellow Dog Linux, DebianPPC or any of the other alternative free OSes that are out there. Yellow Dog installs easier and is a bit friendlier to dual boot with Classic MacOS, but Debian's a good choice if you're geekier. My G3 blue-and-white will get the dual-boot treatment eventually. I have no illusions of ever getting Jag-wire to run on it...350MHz and no Altivec/Velocity Engine/Whatever IBM calls it means no way, d00d, not even crammed with 1GB RAM.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
On my 400MHz G3 iMac w/384MB the terminal took 4.1 seconds to % my ass.
Are you SURE you know how count?
control + pageup or pagedown
#include <sig.h>
People are comparing Mac OS X to Linux, but that's not very fair - modern Linux is _blazingly_ fast thanks to those kernel gurus. OS X seems a bit slow compared to it, but that's just qualifies it as "slower than the fasting thing out there", which is not "slow."
10.2 is much faster - I'm glad that they got a stable, usable OS first and saved the optimzations for later. I find the speed of 10.2 for standard operations (web browsing, working in a shell) on a single-processor 800mhz G4 to be comparable to a 1.2ghz Athlon running Red Hat 7.3. (RH8 is much faster so in that case the G4 will lose...)
Just in case you weren't aware of it yet, Apple has recently hiked the Power Macs' busses to 167 with PC2700 (2.7GBps with much lower latency than RDRAM) memory. The Power Macs also have 2MB of 4.6GBps L3 cache.
I know the G4s were ridiculously choked off there for a while, but I'd think the problem's been licked with these changes.
Step 1) Purchase a supply of alcohol
Step 2) Drink the alcohol
Step 3) Use Mac OS X
Step 4) You will not notice that it is slow
My 550Mhz TiBook with 1 GB RAM feels sluggish. I didn't get much speed boost upgrading to 10.2. My other machine is an XP box with a P4 running at 1.8 Ghz - feels a lot faster especially web browsing. I use Mozilla 1.1 on both platforms.
OSX is a lovely OS but XP is good enough now for me to not miss OSX.
Dale
The hard drive might be to blame, but then again if you are using an IDE drive, then the processor is also plays a part as all copies go through the processor. If on the other other hand you are using a SCSI drive then it will pretty much take care of itself since the controller handles most of the work itself.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I've run Mac OS 10.0.0.4 on my iBook SE (Firewire) as well as 9.0.4, Darwin with X Window System and Debian Linux. Darwin and Linux were the fastest, followed by 9.0.4. Mac OS 10 was barely usable on my poor 466mhz G3. I've seen Jaguar (10.2) on a G4 and its drool-tastic but I still imagine Linux or just Darwin would be faster. I'd like to see if 10.2 is any faster on my iBook. If someone with a G3 466 has tried it please respond and lemme know how it went.
Must be slow, while I have never used a Mac, I have plenty of andecotial evidence that it appears slow from Slashdot, I just decided I don't like Steve Jobs today to so, OS X must be slow.
I however on the otherhand, use Windows, I know that is slow, in fact the more I use it the slower it gets. Until it gets reinstall in which returns to being painfully slow instead of preview-of-hell slow. Anyone that try's to convince me that they have a P4-2GHz is just lying. Windows got fatter and it gets slower so there is no way that they are shipping faster computers with me getting worse performance. They are just adding a zero to that Pentium-200 chip that they had in the warehouse for the last couple of years.
I don't use Linux, but I like it. If OS X is slow, and Windows is slow, Linux has got to be fast because anything is better than what I got right now. I have just run out of possible choices, at least until GNU/Hurd comes out. Then maybe I can hate RMS, and GNU/Hurd will be to slow for me too.
Relative? Try subjective. I have become accustomed to things taking a certain period of time. I have become cognizant through the use of Macs, PCs and Unix boxes what time things get completed in. I hold the opinion that Macs are not worth the premium they command, particularly if you are AGNOSTIC towards operating systems. I use GUI's to frig with the web [browse the web, chop up pictures], all WORK that I do is done in terminal mode. I'd rather use a junk PC than a junk PPC for "fun". Games, PC. "Free" software / shareware. PC. Warez. PC. [Lets face it, I can not afford to buy myself a HOUSE yet, let alone frittering money on software that doesn't help me make money, the concept of home users paying large sums of money for software that they don't use for business/making money is absurd]. That being said, I am of the opinion that "junk PCs" are better serving their purpose. If it's not a Unix workstation, and OS X on Mot-PPC falls drastically short in my opinion of being a member of that archetype, I want a Junk PC. Do I care about mythical theoretical performance on Photoshop? No. Do I get viruses? No. Do I really need a PC or a Mot-PPC to make a living as a "computer person?" No. it's a home-Nintendo-replacement, a fun time-sink - to me.
;) that Apple is not primarily concerned with speed. If you buy a top of the line PC and a top of the line Mot-PPC at any point in time - now run SPEC. Run "openssl speed". Run a kernel compile and time it. Run the same hard drive, the same amount of memory, the same video card, but only have a different CPUI and the result always comes up the same. You get less for more money on Mot-PPC machines. Sorry.
It is not the OS's fault entirely.
- Old FreeBSD userland [3.x]. Was it compiled with -O2? Is -O2 supported on PPC stably? Is gcc capable of producing decent PPC binaries or if Apple had the know-how (see: Sun, Microsoft, Intel, Borland) to make a compiler, would it be better? Should Apple be helping the gcc team help PPC along, or deprecate Mot-PPC with something more optimizable?
- Horribly outdated kernel - microkernel is out! (Laugh at Andrew Tannenbaum , he flamed Linus about MK vs. Monolithic/modular, look who uses Minux, look who uses Linux) [note: NT isn't a true microkernel, and solaris/linux/freebsd certainly aren't, its closest relative is HURD]. Mach was dumped by the progenitors of it, CMU, in 1994. Mach to me is very silly. Linux has hackers in and out as does FreeBSD. No one hacks the Mach kernel for fun. No one gives a rat shit about Darwin. Is there anything compelling about using the Mach kernel over Linux or FreeBSD? (Except Steve Jobs zealotry concerning perpetuating the failed NeXT way of doing things.)
PPC. Its SPEC marks aren't ever published, and when SPEC is run on a Mot-PPC, the results are horrible.
It is a clear combination that makes for a rather unpleasant experience. Let's face it, Unix aint no BeOS or RT-OS, its thick. Context switches are expensive. Memory protection is real. Userland activities are fairly "slow" (note NFS being in the Linux kernel). It is protected, extensible, capable, generally secure, granular, multiuser, portable, but it is not a speed demon. It values other things before speed.
Couple Unix's thickness with Mot-PPC's clear inferiority in terms of general (not vector I'm not listening lalalalalala I don't care Photoshop lalalalala) performance, it makes for a slow concoction.
I have a G4-500-1MB+1GB ram and a new 7200FDB Maxtor with a new ATI Radeon 7000 32MB with quartz enabled I built out for a friend as reference. I don't want to hear any claims of greatness, I have verified by running Linux, Darwin (to see a lean *BSD run - and lean it is - it does almost nothing fresh off the CD), Netbsd and OS X on same-era PC, PPCs and other hardware (namely the sparc
Sun can get away with a laggy SPARC. They offer a LOT of reasons why you would ignore single CPU performance, and continue to utilize that platform [scalability, support, development platform, reliability]. Apple? No way Jose. As time goes on, and as feature sets converge, and more and more of what makes a Good OS ceases to be Novel, Apple's schloctkey hardware performance will come under increasing scrutiny.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Now I can simply complain about the keys that are involved, particularly when on a laptop.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
I was having fits with OS X until I put a stick of 512 in my tower. I usually have tons of stuff open while I'm working and things like X Darwin running GIMP are a lot of extra overhead. Once I doubled the RAM, most all of my problems vanished in a puff of 1s and 0s.
;)
RAM is a very cheap solution here. Just get good stuff, since BSD really -hates- crappy RAM and OS X hates it even more.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
A Mac is the hardware but, from users point of view a Mac isn't a Mac without MacOS.
Take IE, for example. It seems to wait to display the page until it has the whole thing ready to render. On a big slashdot story, that can take a while. Compare to, say, most browsers on Linux, which seem to display while the page is still downloading. Browsing seems way faster on my home system on a 144 Kbit/second connection with Linux than it does at work on OS X on a T3.
On the other hand, I do have evidence that the Mac is actually slow. E.g., when I start to load a slashdot page at work, I often give up, switch over to the XP machine on the KVM switch, and go load it there, and finish ahead of the Mac. The XP machine is an ancient P2 400 with 384 megs of RAM, the Mac is an ancient B&W G3 300 MHz with about 600 meg of RAM, so the machines are comparable (both pathetic by modern standards, but comparable). So, it actually appears that the Mac is slow at browsing, and IE works in such a way to emphasize that slowness, making it seem unbearably slow.
Also, a lot of apps, and Finder, aren't as threaded as they could be. While IE, for instance, is busy getting that big slashdot page ready to display, the dreaded spinning color-ball shows up, so you can't switch back and view the other pages you were reading.
Finally, much Apple software IS slow. There's a thread on comp.sys.mac.advocacy about this right now, where someone was saying that the new generation of iApps seem slower than the previous iApps, and pointing out an apparent correlation between those written in Carbon (fast) and Cocoa (slow). However, other people have pointed out examples of fast Cocoa apps, so that is not the problem. Most interesting was someone who wrote their own photo manager, and compared to iPhoto. For some things, his is 2 orders of magnitude faster than iPhoto. Evidently, Apple simply used crappy algorithms in iPhoto. Apple's mail program is similarly problematic when mailboxes get large. A lot of people on comp.sys.mac.advocacy have given up on it and switched to Eudora, and report their Macs are nice and fast at mail then.
Pardon the obviously stupid question, but why would you listen to a couple of mp3s at once?
Windows 3.1 on a celeron is blistering fast heh
I'm a professional software developer that had to port a large body of code from Windows to Mac. I've also done a signifigant amount of work on *nixes. The Finder interface in 10.0 and 10.1 is unbearably slow. I haven't had enough experience with 10.2 yet to make a call. The problem seems to be twofold, poor UI, and poor implementation.
You have to understand where I'm coming from. I'm no fan of Microsoft's practices or the stability or security of their code. And I am a big fan of OS X technology. A (mostly) user friendly operating system backended to a unix system, with all the unix tools and features I love. Plus I'm not railing on the hardware architecture or the OS core. Codewarrior on OS X beats the pants off Visual Studio on Windows in just about every category. But OS X's Finder, its front door as it were to someone like me, has some serious lacks.
I'm pretty fast in Windows explorer, I have to be navigating between hundreds of source files. I've learned just about all the shortcut keys and my hands move to wherever is fastest to accomplish a given task, mouse or keyboard. When I started working on the mac I was frustrated by the amount of mouse effort I had to expend. If my hands are on the keyboard and I need to do some UI navigation I don't want to have to use the mouse. I call that poor UI. I know there are probably keys there I don't know about, but they certainly aren't readily apparent in the help files. The tab between controls functionality windows has seems to be largely missing. I'm not incapable of learning new shortcut commands, I just need to be able to find out what they are without installing 4 third party applications that add them.
The seoncd part is that the finder is just damn slow. I don't care that its shiny and round and scales perfectly. I have a ~500Mhz G4 and thats more than enough power to make sure that simple tasks like moving files around and editing source code should never EVER have a perceptible delay. Sure, maybe Windows XP might be slow on an equivalently powered PC, but you know what? I can turn off all the UI crap that comes with XP. Not so with OS X. Its about as customizable as your grandmothers sofa, the one with the plastic covering you're not allowed to sit on.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Funny, the only time i've seen XP crash is when you try to do something productive with it.
For example, I use an HP Omnibook 500. It is a Pentium III 700 mhz with 256 MB RAM. Windows 2000 is very responsive on it. I am refering to things like scroll speed, switching between applications, and operating menus.
The other computer is the iBook 600mhz, also with 256 MB RAM and OS 10.2. On this machine, I notice substantial GUI lag, especially when using web browsers. In fact, quite a few apps lag at TEXT ENTRY. I mean, I'm typing into a form field on a web page and it's lagging! And of course, the things like slow scroll speed are obvious to the naked eye.
Now, I'm sure if you ran something like SETI, you would find that the Mac is far faster. Unfortunately, I don't use SETI for my daily work, I use things like email, browsers, word processing, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver! For these, OS X is significantly slower than a 2 year old Wintel, let alone hardware of an equivalent cost.
GUI lag is the most frustrating kind of lag. In order for the GUI to "work", it needs to respond IMMEDIATELY. This immediate feedback keeps the user informed - did they click the right thing? Etc. When it lags, the user must wait to find out if they are "wrong" before making a correction. That is annoying, and that is what OS X suffers from.
Has the last real programmer died yet? I haven't seen any assembly since the 6502 fell out of favor. You kids today don't know what tight code really is.
When the last real programmer dies, nobody will be able to see what higher level languages actually represent.
My plan is nearly complete. Excellent.
My machine, a trusty Blue G3, 350 MHz PowerPC G3, 512 MB of RAM, Rage128 video card (the original one that it shipped with), original HD, etc., sped WAY up when upgraded from !0.1.5 to 10.2. And if you think that's something, I had 10.1.x on my 266 MHz PowerBook G3, which bloody DRAGGED. I later did a clean install of OS X 10.2. The difference was amazing. That PBG3 can't use Quartz Extreme, but just the more efficient code in 10.2 transformed the machine from a Model T with a broken crankshaft into a little Miata!
;-) But my good ol' 266 MHz PBG3 is running better than ever before.
On the Blue G3, QE makes a huge difference. A slower machine that can't devote so much time to drawing widgets, but with Quartz Extreme, the CPU can worry less about drawing widgets and more about figuring out where to put the window, and lets the video hardware do the rest.
I still want a 800 MHz G3 or G4 machine, which to me is about perfect for OS X. ('specially a G4.
-- haaz.
It is faster then the Optiplex NT 4.0 box I use at work
In response to the idea that OS X is slow, ya've got a point.
For one, I am running a G4 400 with 288 Mb RAM, and I see that damned beachball every now and then while I wait for IE to do whatever the hell it is doing. It does get old.
But Seriously, Apple has done a good job, considering all things. Those of us who "saw the light" as it were and converted to mac remember the days of >shudders Windows95.
For Microsoft, this was a major overhaul of their pilot product, and it was riddled with problems. I actually lost count of how many times I had to reinstall windows because of silly, incomprehensible errors like "I/O Protection error." Now what 8th grader is gonna understand something like that.
In short, Windows95 was an abysmal excuse for an OS, but it was still better than Windows3.1 at times, if you had the hardware to run it well. I personally had a 2 year old Aptiva when it came out, and i couldn't even install it. Took me until '97 when I could actually move up, but that's another story.
Now take Apple's switch. They've settled into using a very stable core, and an open source one to boot. Ahh, my UNIX knowledge expands. I like the window management as well, being able to start a internet audio stream and hide it immediately afterwards. Plus I get a terminal, something woefully lost to those pesky windows computers. Praise be to tcsh.
In other words, Apple has done a very good job in completely changing their operating system. If our only complaints are over such simple little things as a beachball wait cursor every now and then (as compared to the incessive crashing of windows v.anything), were pretty good off.
Besides, I like being able to click a check box and use it as a FTP server. very convienient for us UNIX newbies.
-ES
launching browser in OS X, 0.3 seconds longer... launching word in OS X, 0.5 seconds longer... watching the icon hop in the dock while it is launcing... priceless. But really, I'm not sure weather my computer a work (1.3MHz AMD in win2k) or my home computer (667MHz G4 in OS X.1.5) launches its browser faster or gets word going faster. But I am sure that the OS X dock gets me to the app and between apps much faster and this is the task that my computer can most slow me down on / get my mind off my work and onto how I am using the OS.
having yet to emerge from the dark age, i am running os x on a 266mhz imac (won't upgrade til they re-instate multicolor computing...) and i gotta say that i am damn impressed with the speed under 10.2 i tried out both previous iterations, but both were incredibly slow. now jaguar is a bit slower than os9, but the advantages are so great that i can live with the sacrifice.
on the other hand, playing with a new imac (800mhz) at 'the wiz' i found it to be (obviously) much more responsive than i get at home... but by not having a thousand apps open and accepting the occasionally lagging performance i end up with a more than satisfactory computing experience.
not to proselytize here, but i think it is pretty incredible that my five year old machine can still get me though the day with the latest apps like photoshop, dreamweaver, etc. the only progs i cannot run are modern 3d games.
There's nothing worse than a broccoli flavored cock up the ass. Except maybe a key-lime iBook.
MacGamer.com recently reviewed a dual 1.25GHz PowerMac with a GF4. They reported 93 fps in Unreal Tournament under OS9, and 55 fps in OSX, in 1024x768. They didn't list actual numbers for other games, though. They just said "silky smooth frame rates."
Oh God, how could I forget the Panther? I drove that numerous times on the Merc MUSE I played the most. I was also in the DC faction as well as on the BTech 3056 MUSE, as well as brief stints in CMJ--Clan Smoke Jaguar--and Kell Hounds. The Urbanmech was hella slow if I remember correctly.
;)
I was speaking of IS tech as Clan tech is awwfully hard to get ahold of if you're not in a clan; or KH or some other badass merc unit. The Merc MUSE which was like BTech 3062 or something was entirely IS tech, so... I was just thinking of IS in that analogy.
Clan tech is waaaaaay better. That's why they have all those "rules of engagement" and "duel" honor things that IS people like to bait them into traps with.
Anyway, I always think "Particle Projection Cannon" when I see PPC; it's been around a lot longer than the PowerPC
I run on a G3 iMac DV 400 Mhz with 512 Megs of ram at home and a G4 800 Mhz PowerMac with 512 Megs of RAM at work, and generally never get a spinning beach ball either place. I've run OS X since the public beta, it's been my primary OS since OS 10.1. If you're getting a spinning beach ball constantly, this is what I'd suggest.
1. Wipe the HD and do a clean install of OS X 10.2.
2. Make sure you have all the patches installed to the software that you do have installed, especially for Microsoft software.
3. Defrag your drive. OS X hurts even more than OS 9 in terms of fragmenting HFS+, a disk format that is prone to fragmentation (this is probably the cause of the open with dialog box slowing you down - it's looking for the applications on your HD, and if they're not in a easy place to access, well, you're SOL - for me, it was also slow, but just about 5 seconds).
4. For the web browser window being blank, quit using MS Internet Explorer, and use something better like Chimera. Or scroll the window in IE. This is an IE bug.
5. Avoid running 15 different apps at the same time. 512 Megs of RAM is enough.
6. Quit the racism - I'm not white or rich, and I still manage to save and use Apple HW and SW. And the fact of the matter is that MOST companies that sell things are going to market to rich white people because you know, THEY HAVE MONEY.
7. Your dog slowness is not inherent to the system.
I am running mandrake cooker with kde 3.1 on a 400mhz g4 powerbook and NO these macs are NOT slow :) Otoh osx does feel sluggish on it. I always assumed osx being based on freebsd would share bsd's rapidity. So you're saying they rewrote it in a language that compiles into slower binaries?
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
however im not a big gamer so i dont know how those run. On 867 machine with 1.5 gb ram everything seems fine. I can burn a cd, rip a cd, use aim, use a web browser and listen to music all at the same time and I do a lot of the time. Of course i took a tip from unix/linux crowd and made a seperate partition for the swap file - http://www.resexcellence.com/hack_html_01/09-14.01 .html
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
I was reluctant to invest in an expensive Mac for years. I've always wanted one though.
;)
Hehe.. they look fairly cool, but they seemed slow compared to Intel standards.
This summer, I just took the big leap into it and invested over U.S $3500 in a TiBook.
I mean, I could have totally wasted my heard earned cash on this (I bought it in Asia, for half the price in my homecountry). After 3 months of use and some newbie Mac problems (how to change the root password etc) I'm amazed how much I can do. I don't even care if it's slower than an Intel PC or not. I don't know really, I've not found comparisons charts on the net.
But just the integration of different apps into the OS rocks. The whole interface plays with my creativity and I can produce a "ton" more creative work with this PC.
PS. I'm a graphics nerd, so Mac might be right for me, but not for everybody.
Morten.
What's stopping people from using LinuxPPC, anyway? I thought this was pretty good, though I don't know how the sound support's progressed.
-Dave Oftedal
Here it is.
A few months back there was a discussion about the speed of Mac OS X on the Cocoadev mailing list. One person had been investigating the has table used by manu classes in Appkit and Cocoa. Apparently search times in these hash tables scaled linearly (!!). Fix that one and a lot of slowness will probably go away.
Also, it seem that the mach kernel internally is big-endian, even though the PPC is little-endian (or the other way around). This might make the mach kernel faster on X86 processors than on PPC:s. Ouch.
Photoshop on win98se loads much faster than it does under xp on the same exact machine, a 1.333 Ghz t-bird with 256 MB ECC ddr on a 266mhz (ddr) bus. :( Sure the fonts look VERY nice and are easy to install with fontconfig/xft2, but 2 of the three main 'suites' included with the product that the VAST majority of business/home office users want or need do not even use the newer font system or gtk2!? (I'm speaking of mozilla and evolution which don't, and openoffice which does.) MAJOR tools included like 'neat-control' (a network interface controller) and the RHN updater program actually hang and become unresponsive while waiting for operations/tasks that those programs themselves called upon to be executed! The later is the worst hanging the ENTIRE X11 GUI. More than often fonts appear incorrectly - as in parts of a single character do not 'disappear' when deleted or spaced over (yes I know it's in the install faq but that doesn't make it right to release such a product) and this happens with the toolkit itself at times (gtk2). May be a problem with XFree drivers as nvidia binaries with their accelerated triangle/square driver replacements do NOT exhibit this problem (ALL opensource drivers do however).
Games, especially d3d games and older directX titles also run faster on 98se. Not to mention the torid lack of dos support by major sound card companies to provide drivers for XP framework.
Hence over %75 of my so-called 'legacy' software won't even work under xp.
I also use linux on the box and have for some time. Seems like with every new version linux gets slower and slower while becoming more and more buggy. I don't mean to bash it, because at the moment it is the ONLY option for me on this x86 box to browse the www SAFELY (compared to microsof7 products). However, it is very disturbing that my o.s. of choice for x86 is degrading before my eyes and noone chooses to acknowledge this.
Recently installed RH 8, and much to my dismay it uses hordes of my ram, frees the ram so slowly when it needs to (frees pages of disk cache for applications to use I presume) and there are far too many visual glitches in the gui to count
I won't even go into the lack of inclusion FREE (beer or speech) multimedia tools/programs, which RH did not even bother to just include as unsupported (hello?).
Then there is my poor old voodoo2, which I luckily was able to resurrect with the old 'final' rpm's I saved before 3dfx went under. Hint: also need to use debian's device driver src package for the recent kernels. Unfortunately the final glide src rpm's won't compile... glide 3 won't, and glide 2 will only for v1? (despite using the correct and often POORLY documented src). The 'current' (read as in LAST EVER glide release) sucks and only works for XFree 4, and not for V2's, unless you have a phd in nuclear programming! This is a VERY important point... I can run old programs without recompiling them on newer versions of competing operating systems whereas I cannot with the majority on rh8 (no, there are no xfree 3.x compat. lib's). Then there's drivers like the example above, whereas people have hacked existing ones and PROVIDED BINARIES for windows xp - good luck with getting even stable binaries for your latest distro linux.
Those lmbench benchmarks -- no, linux is not 2 times faster. It is more like osx is %85 the speed of linux on same hardware with OLD VERSION OF OSX compared to LATEST VERSION LINUX KERNEL/GNU TOOLS and then only for PIPES/THREADS inner-workings. If anyone here has ever heard of the 10,000 blooming flowers program to benchmark Aqua performance I DARE YOU to create a similar benchmark for GTK2 or QT3 for linux! We'll see who comes out on top there . Seriously, if you haven't heard of it - it brings up a simple window with widgets and all, WAITS for it to completely draw, tells it to close, WAITS for it to close, and then starts over. It does it 10,000 times. And NO it does not just 'refresh' the same window - you did not read the afore correctly. You can read for yourself users benchmarks regarding it by searching google. A year ago 'high-end' mac's roughly 30 seconds (over 300 windows per second).
I read complaints on www from NON-mac users about mac all the time.. nothing changes. I decide to goto a compusa and they have some old-style imac's with OSX 10.5.1 on them - 400 Mhz G3's I believe they were - and played with one for a while. It was glorious. Compared to my K7 running rh8/gtk2, that old and less expensive imac was running circles around my box. The so-called slow resizing of windows was about the same speed as rh8 on an athlon almost 1 Ghz faster with 4 times the video ram. Applications also launched much faster after having a large period of uptime on the imac. Now I don't know about you, but I call that pathetic, and I know what I'm doing. I can't imagine what a linux newbie feels like.
This brings me to the last point - I am selling this hand-made box which I painstakingly selected every individual piece to be compatible with nearly all os for x86 from my dealings with 'alternative' os's the past almost 10 years. Why? I am tired of poor end-user applications, poor drivers, crappy UI and the like. I am getting a mac.
I have the luck (!?) of having a friend with a PC running XP. He has an Athlon 1.x GHz (I will ask him later his exact config).
I have a TiBook 667MHz
We set up at his place. We got a same picture to do photoshop rendering do a rotate, scale and blurr filtering, a movie to load, a big file to copy around, a folder to copy.
We couldn't do any *nix app, X11, Tkl tests because XP has no counterpart for OS X features in that respect.
Nothing scientific, just user perspective, all plain silly, just friendly fun: a 6-pack at stake.
We were shouting finished before going to next task without waiting.
The TiBook got the 6-pack.
I've hear of multi-tasking, but that's just redicolous.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
Isn't the purpose of .NET to be the next JVM? We are comparing apples (Mac OS X) to Windows 2000 kernel. But, .NET is introducing a complete virtual machine for everything. You run a Visual Basic App, or a C++ App, or C#, you are running against the same new common library. This library forces late binding.
.NET applications.
Because codes is VM based code, this foregoes current microprocessor based code, and nearly prevents most optimizations. Of course, there are ways around it, but, then again there are those in OS X.
But, thinking about it... I would rather have a UNIX based OS than a NT based OS.
What would it take for OS X to implement the new VM / common library functions and support all the true
Maybe Microsoft is getting out of the OS market... Heck... Sell one WinXP and Office to Windows users, and have to make excuses... OR sell Office to EVERYONE and make a butload more because it's the more profitable line.... Hmm... Makes ya wonder...
$$$$$
Let me say that I absolutely love Macs and I want one of the new Mac OSX machines. Maybe a little faster than the current version might be nice but that is just because I like blinding speed. Not that my other machines are as fast, but if I was going to drop the cash for that dream system with the screen you can edit a real film on, I'd like something insane.
The latest Mac with Jaguar etc. is plenty fast to drive that huge screen and other apps. However I can tell the machine itself could be driving the finder much faster. Also sometimes I see multitasking delays which BeOS would never show. But otherwise, I like it! Apple continues to build great technology into their consistently fast machines, but as other people have said that pipeline will have to be fatter and add a few more CPUs to make it an SGI killer.
I run Both Jaguar and Mandrake Linux 8.2 on my G4.
To answer the original question YES Jaguar runs slower than Linux , but that is to be expected, after all there is alot more going on when running Aqua than KDE or Gnome.
I also run Darwin 6.02 which appears to run as quick as Linux in command-line mode. I have not installed GNU Darwin but I would expect similer results to Linux.
i've been suffering macs my whole life.
great idea. dog slow tech.
always.
it's the *perception*, see.
i'll never forget my first mac2, 16mhz, 8m ram, 10m hd, 256 color card. i loaded up ms excel and held down right arrow to watch the spreadsheet columns fly by.
but guess what? the screen redraw crawled to slowly, pixel-by-pixel, that i nearly returned my "must be broken" video card.
perception, see.
i came from a lowly apple2e, running 1mhz and appleworx. spreadsheet screen redraw on that thing **smoked** many systems to this day.
that was my first lesson in mac hype.
it hasn't abated.
yes, macs do look pretty, they do lots of cool things, they enable, they are easier to use. but, goddamnit, they are compartively slow as shit. stop apologizing and denying. you sound like an idiot to those who know/own/use, and you mislead and propagate the mac hype to those unlucky future owners.
even the venerable photoshop, for example, from a purely user perspective... i can hit three command key sequences on my pc and have photoshop create a jpg-->web transform and save the file. on my, i fumble around with the silly mouse and menus: there are no key commands to do the same thing in mac version of photoshop.
so, end result, while pc may arguably be mathematically slower, it is more responsive to me as a person.
that IS the bottom line.
and i still wish apple/mac could figure out a way to change the laws of physics! i own 30 pcs, running windows, linux, bsd, etc., and 4 dual g4 macs, running finalcutpro (for video, which is, honestly, the ONLY thing that macs do better than windows, as MUCH as i HATE windows).
anyway, there's my negative two cents. take it for what it's worth, and keep your apologies and flames to yourselves.
--longtime mac user signing off...
For reference, on my box here at work in Windows XP Mozilla feels as responsive as any other app, in fact it uses the theming APIs too so it even looks like native apps (that makes more of a difference than you might think). In Redhat 8 at work (what i now use mostly) it also feels rather snappy, at least as fast as on Windows. On Linux at home it feels much slower, even though they're the same build, and on OS X I've found it feels even slower than that (getting to the unusably slow point). BTW, for that comparison I used the RadialMenus extension - that is a good way of getting a feel for how fast Gecko is throwing boxes around the screen.
The slow UI speed of Mozilla on OS X is caused almost entirely by lack of optimizations in the low level Gecko Quartz drawing layer. Linux had similar problems in the 0.9.x releases, Mozilla was seriously abusing X (a sample trace i saw suggested it was redrawing parts of the screen several times over). Those kind of issues have been largely resolved lately, in part because companies like RedHat have been paying people to work full time on good Mozilla support, and partly because the for the longest time Mozilla Linux builds were shipping without even -O2 optimizations (a gcc flag) because it caused instability on a small number of machines. I think that whatever those instability issues were, they've been resolved, as Mozilla on Linux is now acceptably fast.
Remember that Mozilla is mostly load-on-demand, ie stuff like the mail components, the irc components (even the xul components) are loaded only when needed. People who accuse it of bloatware tend to overlook the fact that the only components Navigator loads that say Chimera doesn't are the XUL objects, and the RDF template engine (a part of xul) - combined these start in easily under a second, and don't really affect performance once underway as Gecko is very fast.
Apples response to this issue could have been, "we'll make Mozilla faster on OS X", but instead it was "we'll write a native front end to it". That's a lot of duplicated code: for what? Lickable widgets that Mozilla had support for anyway? Developing Chimera was the popular option, but looking with a wide perspective they could have got better results by sponsoring the aqua native widgets effort and improving the Mozilla quartz layer.
They always say that men do one task quicker, but women are better at handling multiple tasks.
As a result of this scientific study I say.
Macs are from Mars
Windows is from Venus!
is 999 (less for education, + 50 for ram) a lot for a laptop? and a very nice and solid one.
I know opinions differ on this, but here's my $0.02 on the subject.
Yes, Mac OS X feels slow to me in day-to-day use. I have a G3-600 iMac with 512MB of RAM. Hardly a top of the line machine, but it's not man antique. I've run 10.0, 10.1, and lately 10.2 on this machine. Yes, speed has improved, but not as greatly as some will lead you to believe.
Actually, "speed" isn't my biggest complaint. It's _RESPONSIVENESS_. For example, my Windows 2000 laptop can have a dozen IE windows open, and I'll be Alt-Tabbing between them, and I won't have to wait for the windowing system to catch up... it's as responsive as I am quick-moving. I don't dare open more than four or five IE windows on the Mac, because the system becomes so terribly unresponsive when I have four or more apps open at a time.
I love using my mac, but I've realized that OS X cannot be responsive on this machine, it just can't happen. I'm saving my money for a dual 1.25GHz G4. Maybe then OS X will be as responsive as my 450MHz Pentium II was when it ran Windows 2000 with 128MB of RAM.
I'd compare OS X to BeOS running on a 180MHz machine with 64MB of RAM, but I don't want the rabid mac folks to start throwing bricks.
I hate for this to sound like a troll, I'm a big Apple fan, but I don't like having to wait four seconds between double-clicking on a titlebar and the app minimizing.
Apple should have based OS X on BeOS. I'd have given a very important part of my anatomy to have seen the union of BeOS and the best of Apple....
I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it!
i use the multizilla plugin, and i can switch between tabs with ctrl-left/right-arrow! :D
My iBook takes five minutes to start and thrashes when I start any sort of application... talk about excessive memory usage!
-lid
No, I don't think that OSX is slow, it is a little slow to load but once you are in it is fast and responsive (but it does like to have quite a lot of ram (at least 256Mb IMHO) otherwise it does behave like a pig).
.dmg file and it appearing on your desktop) and package installers, it may not be the most efficient method of distribution but it is SIMPLE!
In those comparisons with unix it may well not perform quite as well, but it does have one thing that all the other linux and other unices don't seem to have a stable development platform, linux changes daily. This is a strength, but it is also a weakness.
What would be great is if there was one repository for a standard linux distribution for desktop and laptop users.
There could be all kinds of modifications to this standard available as add ons but they shouldn't break application compatibility with the agreed standard (changing versions of libraries and GCC etc.).
Also a 'standard' desktop would be a good idea, it would be a great thing to see the Gnome and KDE developers stop bickering, get together and create a great product!
Also, package management, Apple have got things spot on with their disk images (yes I know you can mount an iso image but it's not as simple asdouble clicking a
Innovation is great, and Linux is great for that but I'm not a developer like many people I don't want to spend time satisfying dependencies to run an app, Unix never really took off in a big way for desktop users because of fragmentation of versions, and linux is in danger of doing the same which would be a shame!
I think that as well as working on new gee-whiz features people should look at better hardware compatibility and getting devices to 'just work' because that is something that gives non technical people (and technical people) a real feeling of satisfaction.
I like the mac because at the end of the day at work faffing about with the trials and tribulations of Windoze PC's and Solaris I don't often have to do the same with my trusty iBook, to quote the apple Ads (sorry)... 'It Just Works'
(Please note, I don't have the obsessive Mac disease, it does have it's faults (such as the god awful columns view and it's obsession of using BIG icons in the folders by default, is a tree window and the ability to perform simple file functions from the file dialog boxes too much to ask???) and I use PC's as well and anything to make my life easier and at the moment that happens to be a mac)
Try running Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator or MS Office on Linux, and come back telling us how much faster it is than on MacOS X...
I always perfer the Mac - because it runs smoother, and thus faster. Some things go faster on the Win box (like displaying web pages, sometimes) but generally the Mac is faster and more predictable.
However, if one takes into account the time spent waiting for crashed applications and other things-not-working on the Win machine, the Mac wins like David won over Goliath, basically. Things here (on the Mac) just work.
X11 starts faster on our Athalon XP 1800 server running Debian than on my Powerbook, tho.
there is no spoon
I use an iMac to do some video editing and rendering to VCD, and I've noticed that if I switch from iMove to, say Finder, then the CPU usage of the iMovie render drops dramatically, and the estimated render time shoots up.
It looks like resources are being allocated for the foregorund application - even if it doesn't need them - presumably to improve the user's perception of performance.
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
Someone brought up which is fastest - Carbon or Cocoa.
And someone said that "near the metal" there was no discernable difference.
However, if you code i Cocoa, you will get noticably smaller codebase sizes, and i think that alone explains some of the speedups you get in cocoa apps - try Chimera vs. Mozilla as an example.
Hmm,
.2 on a G3.
I use OSX
I find it slow.
Once immersed in an application I like it, it is comfortable. But I still find it slow. I do only have 256MB ram but that used to be a lot...!
I have a KVM switch and switch happily between linux, OpenBSD, Win2k and OSX (not to mention the vnc sessions running remotely and the VMWare...) and I have to say I use Win2k most for day to day tasks, the mac for graphics (thanks Adobe). As long as I only open one or two apps in the mac things are OK.
I think the whole debate is sort of like when we moved from 68000 to powerpc. EVERYONE complained that it was slow. EVERYONE wanted to move back. But perserverance showed that it was the right move.
Early adopters will always have issues.
I have a G4 Ti Powerbook. The UI was a little slow when I first installed it but I bumped the memory up to 512Mb and now it's fine. 256Mb is not enough for OS X.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Since the original question was about development I just made some test with an lib I'm working on. I compile the same source with the same build system (gnu make + gcc 3) on a PIII 600 Linux box and an iBook G3 700 machine. The iBook compiles in 6m45s when the Linux box compiles the lib in 1m55s. I also tried to compile the code on an external FireWire 7200rpm HD with exactly the same results just be sure the laptop wasn't lagging on the disk side. I did the same compilation on my PIV 1.6Ghz Dell Laptop with VC.NET and it took 2m30s to compile the lib on the internal disk (WinXP Pro). I think compilation times are quite revelent to using a box as a dev machine or not and in my case I think the choice is quite easy to make.
This old chestnut. STILL?
I haven't found anyone who I consider to be sufficiently experienced in both macs and PCs to be able to make this judgement call!
I have a little bit of Mac experience and a little bit more Windows experience and a smattering of linux. (i.e. I support 80 mac users, 12 Linux Servers, 20 Linux users and about 1200 PC users as a member of a team of 8) in a banking environment: these users are possibly the least technical people you can imagine.
Watching someone with no computer experience at all sit down at a bunch of different interfaces is VERY interesting: The thing that apple have got really really right is only having one mouse button. Everything is straightforward and one clickable. OS X is the easiest thing in the world to get going with when you know nothing.
Mind you, watching a user sit down at WindowsXP was an education: It really is surprisingly intuitive once you explain the concept of a "start" button to them (i.e. "All your programs are in the start button") and it is far and away better than any previous version of windows. People just have trouble with the "right click" and "object-properties" concepts. Once they have got the idea of thinking in terms of everything being an interactive object, instead of a "flat-TV like model" they are well away, and actually seem to find the Mac approach a little frustrating.
Linux is just a pig. Sorry guys, it is getting better and better all the time, but in the usability stakes it is still playing catchup. By 2005, I expect Linux will be the desktop OS it wants to be. It is soooo close...but to watch a new user sit down at it with 10 minutes of coaching....they still look just as bewildered by the time they log off and walk away.
With regards to software installs.....XP vs Mac...and windows 2000, you put the CD in...the software installs. It really is that simple.
Speedwise, we found OS X on any G3 machine is quick enough....but somehow 'feels' sluggish. That is all I can describe it as. The OS responds visually to a click almost immediately...but you still end up waiting for results. It is more a problem with the user interface than the actual OS. Saying that, on the newer G4 machines (with a good amount of RAM) it feels great. Truly stunning.
Windows2000 look and feel is awful. The OS just holds you up when mousing around.
WindowsXP....again....if your PC is an Athlon with plenty of RAM XP feels great. Run it on anything slower, and it starts to feel bogged down.
A long post, but as we have just done a usability study on all these OS's I felt it was valid input. Hope you all agree.
P.S. Why do people use a P.S. on an e-mail: Couldn't they just edit it in using a text editor....Hang on....D'OH!
I switched to the Mac about 2 years ago; I bought a G4/450 cube. The OS/X public beta came out around the same time, and I bought it, and was pretty disappointed. Found it painfully slow and lacking in useful native apps. So I kept spending all of my time in OS 9.
Then 10.0 came out; I installed it, and still found it painfully slow. Tried using it a while, but ended up going back to OS 9 and staying there.
Then, around the time that 10.1 came out, I bumped my system RAM from 128 to 384. That and installing 10.1 made the system finally fast enough for day-to-day use in OS/X. The machine still felt very sluggish browsing the web compared to my Windows box at work, but I couldn't blame that on the OS: IE wasn't any faster under OS 9 than it was under OS/X. And at that point, no browser on any platform seemed anywhere near as fast to me as IE on windows.
Nowadays, with the upgrade to 10.2 (my machine can use Quartz Extreme), Chimera for my web browsing, and another RAM upgrade, the machine feels quite snappy. It might still be slower than the 1.something GHz Pentium I use at work, but the difference is much smaller now, and nonexistent in terms of its impact on usability.
While some things, like window resizing and menu opening and so on still feel slower than they did under OS 9, Jaguar scales to handle large numbers of running applications much better than 9 did; It's not uncommon for me to have 8-10 programs running at once, many actively doing some work.That would have been pretty hopeless under OS 9.
Basically, I consider this to be desktop computing nirvana. Well, almost. When my new 1 GHz PowerBook gets here in a few weeks, that will be desktop computing nirvana.
It not just with the latest OS from Apple, either. I installed Windows XP on an IBM 600 (PII don't recall the speed) laptop for sh*ts and giggles expecting it to perform like crap. It runs quite well. Granted, it was running NT 4 SP6 before.
I've seen OS X breath new life into Lombards and iBooks. It's like that movie Awakenings...
--Mike
as a long time Mac user, I've got a year old 500 MHz iBook. Mac OS X is REALLY slow. Especially compared to Mac OS 9.
Web browsing is slower (Opera and OmniWeb on X vs Opera on 9), text editing is slower (CodeWarrior, BBEdit, and PB/IB), email is slower (Eudora), and general Finder speed is about 10x slower in OS X. Every time you change windows or select a menu command there is a noticable lag. It isn't subtle at all.
It really sucks that Apple
I use gcc w/ multiple terminal screens. Also have 512MB of RAM on a 700Mhz iBook. Works great for me.
The hotkey rant is justified. AFAIK, 3rd party product is the only solution.
Of course I'm using 10.1 - I've heard but I would like to see substantiated independently that 10.2 is a lot snappier. I am still mulling if I should acceed to the daylight robbery price Apple is charging to upgrade.
I'm trying to answer the initial question here:
- compared to OS 9: all finder actions are slower, and if they for some reason are not (altivec, extreeeeeme quartz) they sure feel slower. opening and using applications also feels a lot slower. some of my everyday applications actually make me very nostalgic (working on a Quadra... snif, those were the days).
- Windows (95 -> 2000) on sort of equal machines: finder actions in OS X seem slower, except for copying files and networking. Applications: sure glad I use OS X. Win feels a lot slower to me in most apps. (Feels, feels!!!! subjective so don't kill me).
- Win XP: here it becomes unfair, since I've only used it on very new and fast systems:
- finder actions seem a lot slower on OS X. And XP applications seem faster. If I died, went to hell and had to use Windows for all eternity, XP would be my favorite.
My own machine is a 450 Mhz G4 Cube (yeahhhh). Final thoughts: I think that overall OS X *is* the faster system. It has superior logic and simplicity built in as it were and saves you a lot of time in everyday tasks, however slow (I once read "stately") it *feels*...
I bought my first Mac earlier this year, an iBook with 600Mhz G3, 640Mb RAM, 20GB hard drive, Combo Drive (4x, 4x, 6x, 24x), and Airport card. It came with 10.1 installed and I never had any issues with it at all. When Jaguar came out I upgraded to the new 10.2 and kept current on all updates, not that there were very many.
I never have any issues and I never notice the system being slow at all. My parents have a P4 1.9Ghz Dell tower running Win XP Pro at their place and I hate using it because it takes forever to do anything besides web browsing - and even then it sucked because Microsoft hadn't released Java VM for XP yet and so they couldn't even do their online banking and had to use my Mac.
From a different angle...
Has anyone considered the time it takes them to get Windows up and running as well as installing additional hardware, software, etc plus the time it takes when you need to reinstall and/or use all those d*mn wizards in Win XP? Calculate all that out compared to even my paltry iBook (compared to the new midranged macs) and see who is getting more done. You will find that OS X is easier to set up, run, use, and maintain. My father is continually calling saying this is wrong or that is worong with the Dell. Every one of those problems would never have happened on my iBook.
To conclude, everyone who has problems with OS X, expecially 10.2, needs to look at themselves in the mirror and ask why they are so dumb. I keep running into these people with issues with OS X and can't figure out what makes it so hard for them. I haven't installed any system upgrades besides what Apple provides through Software Update so I am not using some secreat software that makes mine work special or anything. What is your issue? If someone is having that much difficulty using a Mac, they can't be helped.
You kids and your mechanical stage coaches! Back in my day we had to write our own copy of photoshop everytime we wanted to use it, and it was faster then...and it was only a 53 byte executable! Oh, and that was after we got the chores done on the farm.
My G4 666 built X11 and gimp in a space of seven hours. So my hardware doesn't seem phenomonally slow. I'm not sure exactly how long either process took, I just did "fink install gimp" and it did everything for me.
Anybody want to spare a 666 PC and build x11 and gimp with all dependancies and see how long it takes them?
As for OS X on my tibook, it's snappy for changing apps, and moving around in the finder, though on network disks it seems a little slow.
This is because Instead of putting things together on screen ( ie show a blank windows icon for all files, show the text for all files, then replace icons for files of this type with this icon, this type with this icon, etc ) it waits until it has all the information for all the files and icons and then shows them all at once.
You get all the information faster, but the information takes longer to start getting to you.
This seems like it's taking unbearably long on network access because it reads the icons in the files instead of reading them from your hard drive like you usually would on windows. This also means that you're reading more information to see a directory over a network on a mac than you would on a windows machine, so bit for bit finder access is slower, but probably not noticably so.
You'll probably notice a greater difference between a 666 tibook and a 800mhz tibook, or one of the new ghz tibooks that came out yesterday than you'll ever notice between an 800mhz machine and a comparably targetted windows machine ( ie low end professional laptop - 2 ghz windows 2k professional )
Speed differences between finder and explorer are like differences between gnome and kde. Everybody knows one is definatlely better than the other, but everyones opinion differs as to which one is which.
In the end, it's a matter of personal preference - which kind of crazy you are.
We're all delusional anyway - there is no such thing as a fast computer.
Well, look at it this way. In the eighties, I used a an Apple IIc...the word "Macintosh" didn't enter into the name at all. The operating system for Macs were normally called System , as in "System 6" or "System 7.5". It wasn't until 8, I believe, that the monicker MacOS began use...someone correct me here...
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
frequent reinstalls. Before I bought my new iBook 500 I spent most of my time with reinstalling Windows 98. It took me at least twice a month do to so and since I run Mac OS X on my iBook everythings just fine. I dont care if an app takes one half of a second more or if some apps need two seconds more to start up when I save lots of time with not reinstalling and not booting up. I just close the lid and open it after a while when my iBook is needed again. I love it. At some point you just dont care about certain things anymore when you are just satisfied about the things you want running. And thats a fact with Mac OS X. You wont get that with any MS product.
I'm a professional programmer. I personally like OS X and use it most of the time on my own equipment. While the Finder is a bit creaky (TiBook 800), most things work okay and I've learned to enjoy the interface for the most part.
I'm currently responsible for a fair sized commercial program (several hundred thousand lines of code.) It's a Carbon application (we have to be practical here!) and is built with CodeWarrior (Project Builder is okay for small, X-only projects. Considering that it's free, CodeWarrior wins hands down for $600 if you need to get stuff done.)
For work, I have pretty much given up and moved back to OS 9. For our purposes, OS X is just not usable yet, primarily becuase of debugging. It takes 10-20 seconds to start up debugging on X (compared to about 2), and everything moves s-l-o-w-l-y. OpenGL and AppleScript (in particular) run so glacially under the debugger that it constantly looks like it has hung (which it often does, on 10.2.) This is on a G4/450 tower, but it's the same on the TiBook.
I have found that I can reboot OS9 several times a day and actually save time. And with 9 I get the time in several large chunks, not dozens of small, annoying ones. Oddly enough, CW8.2 on 10.2 compiles the project much faster than any other OS version, but has other problems that limit it mostly to testing. CodeWarrior has improved steadily over the last 2 years and I remain hopeful.
I've concluded that most X-developed apps are small so far (including OS X itself (many small pieces.)) I've done several smaller projects that worked well. I frankly can't imagine how things like Office or Photoshop could have been done. Maybe they get to use those rumored G5 prototypes?
I can't agree that Windows is better. Most of my Windows time lately has been on a P3/733 running Win2K (admittedly not cutting edge), where Visual Studio 6 is dramatically slower than CodeWarrior on the G4/450 (compiling a single small file takes several times as long, and starting up debugging is almost as slow.) While I don't "know" all the shortcuts like I do on the Mac, the general rottenness of the interface and controls (as usual) slows Windows apps down more than any processor could compensate. Shift-Alt-Control-F42-right click anyone?
HERE to get some idea of what the Amiga 800MHz G4 XE, that I have on order, might be like after it arrives and I have installed AmigaOS 4.0 on it.
... that is something that I can live with because I would prefer speed over eye-candy qualities.
For the last six years I've been running a 68060 50MHz cpu and the NEW experience is bound to be quite different!
I first used commercial applications on Macs and PCs in 1998 when I learnt the basics of Graphic-Prepress. There were aspects about the G3s (which were introduced during my term) that I liked, and others that I didn't. Generally, I prefered the Display Quality and ease of use of the Macs over the PCs, although to be fair, the PCs in use ran Win3.11 and '95.
Reading posts here, I've gained the impression that current Macs may loose some of their speed advantage (over 1998 period Macs) due to excessive graphics overheads because of that pretty GUI.
Since, by the standards of many of the readers here, AmigaOS 4.0 would be considered quite ugly;
I have no idea what the boot-up time of AmigaOS 4.0 on 800MHz G4 would be but the similar Pegasus was reported to Boot MorphOS in sub-3 second times! That compares favourably with the report of a poster on this thread of 15-20 second boot times for MacOSX.
Again, when I've used PhotoShop (1998, 2000, and 2002) on Macs and on PCs I've been dissapointed that the launch time seems 40%-100% longer than that taken by ImageFX on my 1989 model A2000HD with 68060 50MHz and PicassoII 2Mb graphics card.
So, to sum up, I have high hopes for the expected Amiga 800MHz G4 XE with a lean, near RT AmigaOS 4.0 installation. I can live with a "not so pretty" GUI!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
And hopefully mine won't get totally lost in the shuffle.
;), etc. ... all are MUCH faster on my old ass frankenstein G3 than on his brand spanking new Gateway. My Gateway owning roomie will even attest to this, and now he's kicking himself for not getting a Mac (partially due to Sherlock, actually).
;)
... it is custom made to organize data on Mac OS X drives in a way that speeds up the operations of the OS by orders of magnitude. Just did it last night and it cut my app launch time in HALF - and this is in contrast to doing regular Speed Disk optimizations and only seeing a hair of difference. So see if you can find it on LimeWire, its AMAZING, really makes OS X fly, especially on older hardware like I have.
Just from an average user's perspective (which I am not, but my roomates are), Mac OS X shreds the living daylights out of WinXP.
Case in point - my roomates new Gateway 2.4 GHz machine w/ WinXP Home is SLOW as all getout opening apps, drawing windows, traversing directories w/ lots of files in them, etc.
By contrast, the G3 I built from parts (420 MHz G3, 768 MB RAM, 2 7200 HDs on a 66 MHz bus) is faster in day to day activities like web browsing, using Office, using Sherlock (oh wait, only Mac users get Sherlock
So, is OS X slow? Answer: an unequivacable NO. Is it instantaneous? well, NO. But we're getting there
BTW - and this will be of interest to fellow Mac users - there is a Norton Speed Disk profile for OS X floating around the web
I do find OS X to be slow. Regardless of any possible technologies, bugs or wrong approaches causing this, the end user experience is still that various everyday tasks are simply very un-snappy.
Examples.
1) Mail.app, even in 10.2, simply loves to hang. This can be either during "writing to index" or while its waiting for a network response that will never be there.
2) Many of the OS's pulldown menus for some reason need to access your drive. This can be either to load an icon situated in one of the menu items, or maybe even for no reason. If any of the drives accessed are currently sleeping, it can take up to five seconds for the dropdown to even appear.
3) Web browsing is slow. Not only the rendering (interpreting and displaying the downloaded source) is sluggish, but also scrolling and resizing. Do this on a PC after a days use of OS X and you're likely to raise an eyebrow. I know Chimera is a relatively fast browser and IE can be pretty snappy also. But not compared to any PC in the current similar pricerange.
4) The Finder is still slow. Yes, it may be a lot faster than in 10.1 and especially 10.2, but it is still not even close to snappy.
Overall, 10.2 has been the first version of OS X that is getting somewhere performancewise. Try using a 10.1 box and you'll cry. However, before OS X can be recommended to anyone who has to rely on performance and reliability, I think we're way beyond 10.3.
These, by the way, are the experiences of someone using a G3/400 Yosemitebox w/ 384 MB of RAM. At work I use a G4/700 TFT iMac. The same issues above apply to the latter, only less drastically.
Provided you have a supported graphics card for quartz extreme you will find the 10.2 interface much faster.
You can use the Command key with all of the arrows to do just about anything you should need to do via the keyboard in Finder. I hated the fact that in Finder hitting enter renames the file instead of opening it like Windows does when I first got my Mac. Now I love it and wish Windows did the same thing. Command+o opens a folder or file. I believe Command+down does the same thing. Command+n opens a new Finder window and Command+Shift+n creates a new folder.
Read this article for more pointers.
Don't talk smack about Finder until you've spent more time with Finder in 10.2. It's largely been re-written AFAIK. It is far faster than previous versions and has a few new features as well.
mbbac
Is Mac OS X slow? Yes.. and no... I could definitely work a lot faster in Mac OS 9, but that's probably a familiarity thing. Still, I just can fly around the OS like I used to. I use a 400mhz G4 daily (with Mozilla) and I definitely think it's slow in some tasks. Moving 100 large files in the Finder on a remote volume can be painful, then again, I can do it in the terminal 10 times faster. Until my employer get's me a new Mac, I'll just work at a relaxed pace. I also use Mac OS X on a 733mhz G4, and it's much improved, still some things feel a little slower than they should. I've also got a 250mhz G3 PowerBook, and while it is of course slow, about all I do with it is use Mozilla for mail, news, and browsing, so it doesn't seem that slow. If I tried to do development work on it, I'd probably do a lot more swearing and waiting...
...end of transmission...
Regardless of how slow Mac OS X does or does not 'feel', applications do have a tendency to respond and startup slowly. Some figures (measured right after logging in on a iBook 700Mhz/384MB/20GB using Mac OS X 10.1.5):
mozilla 1.2 beta startup:
first run: 13s
second run: 6s
chimera (the 'fast' mozilla) startup:
first run: 8s
second: 2s
terminal application (the console):
first run: 11s
second: 2s
MS Word: 6s, XDarwin: 24s, etc...
Even compared to far slower PC's running Windows or Linux, I find those figures nearly unacceptable. Bouncing icons are neat to look at, but they do get boring after a while...
Aside from these figures, there _is_ the subjective OS X 'feel'. I noticed a lot of posts talking about how 'nice' and 'fine' OS X runs (on G4 CPU's with lots of RAM, of course). That's just how OS X feels like: it's responsive 'enough'. When you click something: it almost instantly responds. Almost.
Luckily, while all the eye candy is heavy on CPU load, Apple made sure that Mac OS X gives you feedback enough to make sure that you know it's doing _something_ (the dreaded pinwheel of death excluded).
Mac OS X definitely misses the snappiness of Windows or Linux though... but I guess a lot of users percieve this as a 'stable and solid' feel.
Oh and, Jaguar reportedly cuts off approximately 1-3 seconds of the mentioned startup times. But shelling out more than 100 bucks to make my apps start a sec faster? I don't know about that...
By the way, a very interesting read about the performance in general of the Mac OS X versions can be found here.
More surprisingly, the PC (256MB RAM) is used almost exclusively to run IE and Outlook and would crash about twice a week on everage, while the iMac (512MB RAM) is used for everything (programming, graphics, word processing, email, web browsing, gaming, music, DVD, NAT, software base station, etc) hardly ever crashes ever since OS X public beta 2 years ago. The PC is shut down every night due to unbearable noise level, while the iMac is typically loaded simultaneously with many applications and runs for weeks and weeks without rebooting or noticeable performance degradation. The iMac is nearly 4 years old, and I never spend any money to upgrade it other than adding some more memory and an Airport card, but it gets faster with every new version of OS X in the past 2 years. I like to know how many of your PC users are happy with a 4 years old PC running the latest MS bloat ware?
<rant>(Answer: It doesn't matter. Mac OS X is closed source, making it insecure and untrustworthy (because Apple and Microsoft are able to throw trojans into it, and probably have), making it useless. An operating system that does absolutely nothing can be very fast. Mac OS X is such an operating system. If it were possible to run it under MOL, it would be a toy rather than useless, like Windows in a virtual machine, which is not much of an improvement.)</rant>
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
I am probably too late to the discussion but here goes anyway.
I have seen a lot of comments saying 10.0 was slow, 10.1 was faster, 10.1.5 was even faster and 10.2 is blindingly fast. Yet nobody knows why these improvements are happening. I'm sure they are happening because of Apple software engineers getting more and more creative to make the software faster (since the hardware a'int getting any faster). Still, you don't know what exactly was fixed in the minutest detail from one release to the next.
Dare I say it is a sign of being a zealot if you take everything a closed-source software company throws at you without question. I would take my chances with Linux/*BSD any day where every enhancement is open to scrutiny.
Disclaimer: I do like Mac OS X from what I have heard of it. To the tons of people who have found their dream O/S, congratulations and, in all sincerity, I hope you enjoy your computing experiences.
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
Admittedly I am biased due to my long use of the Mac in its various incarnations, but I don't find the Finder operations to be that slow at all.
What you seem to be complaining about is the user experience that you have trained yourself to use. As anyone who has had to switch from one usability schema to another will tell you, you sometimes have to un-learn or re-learn what you already know.
I have no problems whatsoever in the Finder on the MacOS. In fact, I find it easier than the Explorer on Windows. I find myself wanting to use command-shift-n to create new folders in Windows all the time.
The problem is more of perception than reality. If you have worked a long time with a particular interface and have customized to fit your work style and habits, then of course switching to a different interface is going to be "slow". None of the day-to-day file operations that I use and I edit a decent amount of source code for webpages and applications.
As for the dilineation of shortcuts, try this link.
Anyone format a floppy diskette with MacOS X? Does it even support floppies anymore? I bet it takes just as long to format a diskette on MacOS X than on other Windows PCs.
I'm talking full format.
I am running OSX 10.2 Server Edition on a G3 400 Blue and White tower. Carbon apps are just as fast on loading and execution as on OS9. Cocoa apps (which won't run on OS9) appear to be slightly slower, but only in a few cases. Generally speaking, OSX Jaguar has really sped up my G3 server.
I installed Jag on my TiBook 800, but it has a fast video card, so I can't tell if 10.2 is faster here or if it's just a factor of Quartz Extreme kicking in. Regardless, the realtime zooming into and out of the screen, while a DVD plays, is soooo smooth.
-Chilton
-Chilton
most mac users don't want to admit it but while the kernel may be decent the UI is a POS. it's slow and ugly, kinda like my neighbors kid. Switchers:
On the Atari 2600 we only had 128K of RAM and half of that was for the stack. We had 2K for code, unless the game was really, really good, and they would spend the money for a bigger ROM, then we got to use 4K.
The Finder is much faster in 10.2, probably mostly due to Quartz Extreme. It does still feel slightly sluggish when doing some things. Usually when you start to do a task, then once you're doing it it is fast.
I'm pretty fast in Windows explorer, I have to be navigating between hundreds of source files. I've learned just about all the shortcut keys and my hands move to wherever is fastest to accomplish a given task, mouse or keyboard. When I started working on the mac I was frustrated by the amount of mouse effort I had to expend. If my hands are on the keyboard and I need to do some UI navigation I don't want to have to use the mouse. I call that poor UI. I know there are probably keys there I don't know about, but they certainly aren't readily apparent in the help files. The tab between controls functionality windows has seems to be largely missing. I'm not incapable of learning new shortcut commands, I just need to be able to find out what they are without installing 4 third party applications that add them.
First, there are a fair number of shortcut keys that one can learn to speed things up. I got my first Mac recently and have learned many of them because I've got a laptop, which makes mousing even more painful for me.
Second, there's a number of utilities out there to improve the Finder's functionality. I would highly recommend LiteSwitch X if you miss the way Windows handles alt-tabbing. If there's something you don't like about the Finder, someone has almost invaribly written something to fix it for you, including the ability to create your own keyboard shortcuts. VersionTracker is a good place to start for that. I know there's one or more freeware apps that provide you with the ability to assign shortcut keys, so you might want to check that out as well.
All that said, I do wish that the Finder were somewhat more responsive, and that it came with more configuration options out of the box. I've noticed that many of the builtin MacOS X option panels are extremely dumbed down and don't provide GUI access to a lot of the more complicated options that exist in some of the underlying applications (samba and ftp are two that spring to mind in this category).
I have a 667 TiBook with 10.2.1. I don't find it slow. It certainly isn't as fast as windows as Steve would have you believe but it's fast enough for what I do. I rarely find myself frustrated. I am much happier with this machine than with my windows machines.
Something intruiging...
My 2 cents, Perception is all there is, who really cares what you think! I love OS X, since 10.0 have used if for my daily work. I don't do Photoshop or program, I am a office/home user. But is it fast enough, or faster than OS 9, for me yes. I'll suffer the millisecond or two of wait to get nearly zero downtime for system crashes. The time saved for not having to reboot my TiG4 667mhz after at type 1 or 11 error. god, use OS X or not, but grow up. Think about the "end user". This is light years ahead of my beloved OS 9. Apple cannot live with that. This is the future. Get on the bus or live in nostalgia.
One issue that seems to be a big factor with OS X that many users overlook is file fragmentation. After about a month or two of use, the OS starts to become noticeably slower and slower to most users.
I've been looking at the way things work in OS X and have found that the OS is extremely sloppy in the fact that it does not deal with fragmentation on its own, nor does it provide users with a tool to defragment the drives. The typical new Mac OS X user wouldn't even think about this sort of thing.
To combat the issue, I now keep a custom boot disk handy with a defragging tool on it, so I can keep the system performance optimized.
I'd also like to put to rest any rumors that defragmenting an OS X drive with an OS 9 will render a system unbootable. Not only is this not the case, it's complete foolishness. The HFS+ file system runs exactly the same way regardless of what OS is using it, so unless you do something that modifies the actual data of OS X-specific files, you have no risk of losing OS X.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Deep inside macosx is microkernel based. Freebsd is not.
Therefore, noway macosx can be same fast as freebsd, assuming they will run on the same hardware, which situation is not possible or at least any such benchmarks are not published. Or are they?
Less is more !
I couldn't agree more. On a reasonably old iMac, operations that take essentially no time at the shell can take several minutes using the dreaded Finder. The time to delete or copy a large chunk of files is amazing - several minutes with the GUI, but instantaneous with rm or cp. I now use the command line almost exclusively for file management in OX, which is too bad....
Try Chimera 0.6, It's way fast and pretty stable.
try chimera, it has tabbed browsing and is fast
Yes, OSX can be slow; usually when a work college comes and looks at something I'm doing...
There again, I'm on a 400MHz G4, and due to the nature of my work I'm usually running:
- Mozzilla 1.1
- Internet Explorer 5.2
- Netscape 4 (Classic)
- Terminal.app with multiple ssh sessions.
- Lotus Notes 6 Client (native/Java).
- Vignette Development Center (Java).
- Virtual PC (Win 98), usually running Word and IE 5.
- ProjectBuilder
- Mail
- Console.app
- SQLGrinder
- Stickies
And apache is usually serving out a few CGIs locally.
With half these windows on screen at the same time, using a whole load of backing store, its no wonder it's sometimes a bit sluggish swapping apps.
Individually the apps themselves are snappy.
Oh and BTW, compiling/linking on NeXT used to lock up the whole machine for the duration; that doesn't happen any more!
Given the complexity of real life applications, the real question is indeed identifying the bottlenecks which slow down the user.
Indeed it is not some obscure kernel question but improving the overall user experienced speed.
Two things i noticed:
1) home networks setups can be horribly under optimized. People use mixed networks with Win and OSX machines and Apple network utility is not at all user friendly. OSX does not have NEtbeui and misses many protocols. If a user does not know how to trun it off, it is still burdening the network with Appletalk, which is a useless dynosaur.
2) OSX still cannot print across a Win network on NON POSCRIPT printers. Even with Dave. Now most home users have cheap inkjet printers which sometimes do not even have USB ports. Yes if you are a geek you can install Superprint etc. But who has the time?
3) generally, OSX loads applications much slower than Win XP. There is some latency in the system.
My suggestion would be to include in the OSX a really smart bot which monitors resource bottlenecks and identifies when the system is stuck waiting for something to happen which may be instead "cutoff".
GS
I don't know. Yellow Dog Linux is pretty slow on my Mac. Of course, that's not surprising since it's a Powermac 8500 running at 120MHz that I got on eBay for $60.... It probably wouldn't run OS X. :)
Woohoo! First post (of mine) as a Linux user!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Look - I love macs, have 3 powerbooks alone, a TAM and a new iMac. They're what I use at home. I love the look of my white iBook - my primary computer at home. It's the coolest looking notebook out there. I, however work using PCs all day. All flavors of X have been slow on the iBook (500MHz). It is my main complaint of the os. Use a midlevel pc for a week, then use a midlevel mac for a week and the mac is slow. I wish it weren't, but it is. The OS feels like molasses were poured into it. Heck, use an old 7200 form factor Powermac G3 with OS 8.5 running on it - THAT feels incredibly zippy compared to X on my not very old iBook. Why are we mac users so afraid to call a spade a spade. Perhaps if we all told Jobs the truth, he might actually believe it. There is no disrespect or dishonor in speaking the truth.
Unfortunately, many apps are suboptimal ports or are not properly designed and implemented for Mac OS X. The most common offenses:
1) Redundant drawing redundancies. Your app doesn't really need to redraw all it's text before and after scrolling one line, does it? Does repainting your toolbar 3 times for each character the user types really help? (Real observations of real shipping apps made this morning.) Use QuartzDebug, fix the superflous drawing.
2) Mac OS X windows are already buffered. Drawing into that offscreen Pixmap, then copying to the window buffer is a superflous step that just slows things down and defeats hardware acceleration. Please don't do that.
3) Polling WaitNextEvent, are we? Use Carbon events. Please leave CPU cycles for someone else. Being able to call WaitNextEvent 50,000 times a second is NOT something to brag about. (You know who you are.)
The Quartz drawing layer is actually pretty fast. It can render large PDF documents at rates of 60-100 pages per second on my older G4 box. (Speed measured at the API level, rendering to a buffered window, no bells and whistles.) A page of text and graphics, almost full screen, per vertical blanking interval strikes me as reasonable performance.
All the other silliness describe above is a bit of a boat anchor on UI performance. It doesn't matter how fast a drawing layer is when some app insists on using it inefficiently.
It is still not clear for me why we need G4 if I did Quark and Photoshop on Quadra 700 and 950?
10.2 runs perfectly fine on this machine, though it's ATI Rage128 Pro doesn't take advantage of the new OpenGL rendering engine.
I compile applications (both standard *nix ports and Aqua apps I've written myself), encode MP3's and MP4's, all without a performance problem.
Note that the current iMacs have significantly more "umph" than my G4, so they work even better.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Okay, I've done it again and been less than clear. Mach (the Kernel of Darwin/Mac OS X) is written in C (using GCC - just like Linux).
Up from that the Objective-C runtime is also written in C (and can be called from C). This is actually a VERY quick system. You can call Cocoa from C if you want (but honestly, Objective-C is much easier you're better off using that). And there are ways to making Objective-C messages faster if that is needed (most of the time it isn't).
Objective-C isn't a slow language as implemented by Apple, but they don't use it in the Kernel anyway. Actually it's not used in the BSD adaptor layer or even the lower levels of Cocoa (Core Foundation). But it isn't anything to be afraid of, it's fast.
I bought an Snow iBook shortly after MacOS X 10.0 was released and installed it right away. It was sluggish then and has improved over time. I started with 128mb of RAM but upgraded to 384mb. That helps a lot because I like to run many programs.
What I typically run includes Mail (Apple), Internet Explorer, iChat, Yahoo Messenger and at different times I run Netbeans and jEdit. I have noticed that Java applications are slow, but that can be expected of Java and Swing. (try thinlet.com)
But I see that spinning rainbow circle way too often. I do get a lot of mail due to being on mailing lists for FreeBSD, Tomcat and others, but Mail just crawls as it tries to manage the folders. This is supposed to be a threaded application, but there is clearly a performance issue. IE seems to have similar issues.
One indicator that I use to see the slowness is moving from application to application. There is a noticable lag in pulling another application forward at times. Sure I am on an iBook with a slower processor and a slower system bus, but when I ran OS 9 it was just fine.
I would suggest that the shadowing and transparency is not necessary and I really wish I could turn them off from the Appearance preferences. They waste a lot of CPU time and slow me down. I do not need or want the eye candy. If you look closely at WinXP, you will notice they use a clever method to draw the buttons and windows which are not so cpu intensive. Doing away with shadowing and transparency will go a long way to speed things up.
Since 10.2 was released with the Quartz Extreme I have to say things are much faster, but Apple has lots more work to do.
I have said it before and I will say it again. I will not buy Apple hardware again until the OS is fast and the hardware is not behind the PC hardware. The phrase Megahertz does not matter is often used by Apple, but in an editorial I once read the author insisted that Gigahertz does. Being a full Gigahertz behind the Pentium and AMD processors makes the PC users laugh at the Mac users. Right now I can go out and buy a nice PC case, install a Pentium 4 and get a decent monitor for under $800 and install Linux or FreeBSD and do most of what I can now do with MacOS X.
Sure KDE, Gnome and the supporting applications may not be as refined in some key areas, but performance is key. They blow the doors off MacOS X. And so does my Windows 2000 workstation which sits right next to my iBook. (Pentium 4, 1.8Ghz)
I do not like it, but it is true.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
I use OS X 10.2.1 on a 450 Mhz G4 and I also have a 600 Mhz Pentium III running Windows 2000. OS X is getting faster but the finder is still slow even on a decent G4 for certain operations. My biggest peeve is file list updating. It seems like every time I go to the Finder and try to double-click on a file, I end up double-clicking the wrong one because the damn finder suddenly realizes there is a new file in the directory and rearranges the list when I'm in mid-click. This is being SLOW. There is no reason why the Finder shouldn't be able to do this sort of thing in the background instead of waiting till you're working in the window. There are also other things. Try using the Get Info command and be prepared to twiddle your thumbs. It's not the hardware because OS 9 was fine with these things. Basically, OS X is still a work in progress and I expect these things will be fixed, perhaps in OS X 10.3. And I still hate Windows. :)
My gosh, I'm glad someone else sees this too. I know Intel is basically doing the same thing with their current "Can a new PC make your life better" ads, but the PC-geek people I know see this as "power envy" and gee-whiz advertising.
The Mac guys I know see the hype for the digital video and audio capabilities (wow, it has firewire built in!) and run with it like it's unprecidented.
-- sb
Yeah the Finder was a major pain in 10.0 and a pain in 10.1 - in Mac OS X 10.2 - it's an irritation. Progress has been quite good (but I still find the Finder to be a little lacking).
You wanna know what - it's a Carbon app! Now there is no reason Carbon apps need to be slow (hard to write, maybe). Personally I don't really understand why the most important single App was written this way - I don't know. But it has got significantly better between 10.1 and 10.2 - I think it has some way to go yet - but it's okay now.
The list of thing includes:
- rendering of the same HTML by Mozilla;
- rendering of the same XML by Cocoon;
- performing the same query in PostgreSQL database;
- byte-code compilation of the same package of scripts by Python;
- byte-code compilation of the same code by Elisp;
- LaTeX document rendering;
- GCC compilation of the same code;
- execution of various Apache CGI scripts;
- running of OpenOffice;
- running X11;
The list could be even longer, but many software (interpereters, APIs, servers) I need for my work is not compiled under Macosx at all or not in the version I need.I understand that Photoshop runs on Macosx faster than on Linux b/c there is no Photoshop for Linux. That's why I compared performace on equal examples.
I've spent 6 months trying to love Macosx without any success. Probably I demand too much from that grandma-oriented OS.
Less is more !
You just did yourself a dis-service by briefing lauding your credentials. You're only a professional because someone pays you, not because of your knowledge or experience base.
/. before, b) it was all over the mac newsgroups and web sites, c) it was mentioned in passing on emails and conversation as a would be joke, d) I've seen it on CompUSA's machines, e) Apple has released documentation and information regarding their addressment of these issues.
Every freakin person with a clue knows that the 10.0 and 10.1 interface was slow. Everyone. I don't even own a Mac and I know this because a) it's been mentioned on
In fact, on the last point, they still say there is much room for improvement and that 10.2 is where it is useable to the majority of folks without being exceedingly annoying. This OS has been out awhile and I'm still astounded that they at least have borne the effort to continue to improve it instead of relying simply on hardware increases.
The question was whether the present setups are slow. As others have more correctly stated, interface responsiveness is slightly slower than is typical.
So, then the ports to OS X of the software you mention, like Cocoon, run faster natively than they do when ported. Well, goddamn!! You have hit upon the major problem with OS X. Too many ports. Rather than getting a fresh new version written under the OS we get half-assed hacks of other software. Good Point. Maybe you should consider working on your English skills rather than worrying about presenting nonesense to the rest of us. Twit!
The reason Apple stopped calling the Mac OS'es (System7, system 7.5, etc.) was to accomomodate the clones. So someone would see at bootup Mac OS 8 (or whatever) instead of welcome to Macintosh, which it really wasn't.
Is slower than I'm used to. I run a Pismo 400 G3. I hear it's faster with a G4 and quartz extreme.
iTunes takes about 10% of processor to just play an mp3. I remember winamp taking about 1% on my dual pentium pro 200. This really slows down my system because I am always playing music. Not sure if multitasking is just slow in general.
I'd say that with the age of my system (close to three years), speedwise, OS X is doing pretty well.
By the way, the Terminal in OS X on a 400 g3 is about 10% as fast in drawing as it is running on a 200 p5 running Solaris. And I don't have transparency enabled. For something as simple as drawing aliased text, I think this is a bit absurd.
MHz, GUI, whatever; it's the user that makes the biggest difference, and the interface or processor can help, that's about it.
I was given a purseBook (366MHz iBook G3, 192MB RAM) to use at work and took awhile to change it over from OS 9.1 not because of speed issues, but because I've been using Keyquencer for years to avoid the mouse and script simple or complex everyday tasks with a keystroke. An app that lets you keep the gui yet avoid the mouse, that speeded me up way more than any upgrade.
Sure, some things are visually slow in Aqua, especially on this machine (not on the media workstations I manage, however); but I have alot more going on, fingers keep moving, and it's therefore even faster than my tweaked OS 9 systems. Especially now that LaunchBar lets me access just about anything without the mouse, combined with keyboard GUI access through Aqua. I'm starting to grok OS X, and it helps me do that since it's based on many open standards and years of interface development.
So: slower to sit and watch; faster to use. Whatever, RTFM and get a wetware upgrade, for the best real world result times.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Yes, Mac OS X sometimes feels slow on my machine (iMac with 400 Mhz G3 and 8 MB VRAM). Example: Browsing. If I installed Linux (optimized, no out-of-the-box SuSE PPC), Mozilla would outshine my Chimera here (which renders pages fastest on Mac OS X as far as I can tell). Also, any browser under Mac OS 9 would be faster. Same goes for scrolling in most apps or clicking on a button where I have to wait sometimes. So, I know it's not only the hardware but also the OS that makes my computing experience slower on this machine. I don't want to get into why I don't install Linux here.
:) And when I'm big I'll get a G4 and Quartz extreme compliant GPU.
Now I could use Mac OS 9.0.4 and Photoshop 5.5. Clicking on a button would mean instant reaction. Why do I use Mac OS X and Photoshop 7? Because Mac OS X lets me do stuff I couldn't possibly do on Mac OS 9 or earlier. And in a way I couldn't possibly do. If I had as many apps open in Mac OS 9, as many up- and downloads progressing, I'm very sure my iMac wouldn't be useable at all anymore. Scrolling wouldn't be slow but not happening. Hell, I'm running an FTP server and really use my DSL line. In Mac OS 9 I had to go for a coffee break just to scan pictures.
What I want to say is: Yes, Mac OS X feels slow sometimes but I never thought to go back for a minute
Oh, yes: I know Linux (in fact worked with it), compared the speed and even was a Windows user a few years ago. So I guess I can compare some stuff.
To this day I have a working Z80 system I built myself, including using old TTL chips for all the address decoding, which I recently replaced with a simple FPGA implementation. I'm still comfortable with Z80 and x86 up to the 486s or so, I've written my own bootloaders for x86 boxen (fuck GRUB), I can decode PIC opcodes visually from hex. I've literally counted cycle times down to the microsecond for bitbanging out RS232 and PWM signals on 4MHz PICs. And you're tellin me I don't know what tight code is? :P
It's quite speedy. 10.1.x is a little slow. MacOS X PB was extremely slow.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You've been sucked into the megahertz myth once again. Mac people tend to be slower, shallower - but with a wider intake of information, therefore processing information at roughly the same speed as a Windoze user. So the apparently 'slower' OS makes no difference at all. Lastly - Mac people tend to 'work together' on things. Two or more will gang up to solve a problem - each taking a part of it - then assembling the finished result - so when speed is a 'problem' we just toss another brain at it to the same end.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Tough to say.
Startup seems slower if there's hard disc problems. The Finder is a bit slower at some things but faster at others. (In particular, I find scrolling to be much more responsive.) Microsoft Word is quite a bit slower. But Chimera is the fastest web browser I've ever used, Mail screams (now - it was a pig at first, but it seems to have built whatever caches it needed), MT Newswatcher is insanely fast, etc, etc.
I wonder how many people who complain about how slow it is have run top to see what's taking all the processor time...
Oh, in case anyone's curious: Powerbook G4 @ 500Mhz.
My first computer was a Macintosh (LC III 4/80) I really loved this machine, like any mac that ever existed it was much faster than any PC that will ever exist! no but ceriously I owned other Macs lather, then in 1998 I sitched to a PC, I'm sorry but speed was my main concern... and it's still the same feeling I get everytime I lay a hand on a Mac mouse (G4 or not, OS X or not) it just does not feel right, the interface is fine... in classic, in OS X it's pure CRAP, even 10.2 is slowwww, all from GUI to Network transfers... the browsers sucks (even Chimera is bad... anyway most mac users still use IE since it's the only bundled browser) the only thing I would like to be ported to windows from Mac OS S would be iTunes and iPhoto, they are the gems, not performance... I don't even think a G4 is as fast as a pIII 800Mhz with the same amount of ram, it does not feel faster in any situation if that's what you want to know.... but who cares, since the slowest PC money can buy might well be as fast as the fastest mac money can buy.... OS X or not
Easy.
Run top on OS X 10.3 at 800Mhz: 10% CPU.
Run top on Linux at 600Mhz: 0.5% CPU.
10% to run top?! What the pluck?
I'm writing this on a dual 1GHz G4 sitting next to my Dell 2.4GHz PIV. The Mac is perfectly fast, sometimes a bit slower than the Dell, usually similar, in some remarkable cases -- usually Photoshop or Video related (where Altivec kicks in) it leaves the PIV in the dust.
There are non-performance related differences:
The Mac cost me 2.5x as much.
The Mac is an utter joy to use. The rendering of text by Quartz -- e.g. in a web browser (I use Chimera) -- is simply lovely; the PC cannot come close.
The Mac (running 10.2) is MUCH more stable than the PC (running XP Home).
... although when I have the "Helios" screensaver running as the desktop wallpaper on my 1600x1024 Cinema Display and then I open two overlapping transparent Terminals my G4 Dual 867 does lose its responsiveness a little.
But seriously, Apple is forward-thinking all the time. Jaguar may be decidedly slow on older hardware (still quite usable, however), but the latest G4 machines make Jaguar scream. The next generation of processors will be faster still, and the OS is poised to make full use of it.
Today, drop shadows. Tomorrow, ray-traced shadows!
-- thinkyhead software and media
You can actually "turn off all the UI crap" in OS X. There are a couple of ways but my favourite is to let the machine boot to the login screen, and choose to login as "Other" which will present you with a typical username/password text fields to fill in. (If you don't have your machine setup to boot to the login screen you'll already have these username/password prompts already, OR you've got things set up to autologin, which just means you'll have to "Logout" from the apple menu and go from there) Anyway, once you get to the username/password prompts, type in your username as (without quotes) ">console" and viola!... pure Darwin, in all its splendor. No GUI at all. In fact, this is a really great way to get good performance from X11 too. It feels great to have AfterSTEP, etc.... running full speed ahead with a simple "startx".... Also, there are ways to have the machine boot into various levels of command-lined-ness. Do a little poking around on google to be sure, but I think one is Cmd-s during startup, which will boot you into single user mode, which is very geeky and bare-bones-y. When you boot into this mode you don't even have your harddrive mounted and need to do it manually. There are other options like this one so do some research. I would especially like to suggest this before ranting with such fervor on a forum like this. I would actually like to propose that you can do MORE with the console mode Macintosh than with any windows machine. All the services are still up and running, including a full TCP/IP stack, webservers, ftp servers, ssh servers, any cron tasks, etc, etc.... I don't know about this for sure, but I don't think that the command-line mode on a windows machine will keep a user this well supported... Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Bzzt, sorry, thank you for playing, but that's not what I meant at all. By turn off all the crap I mean the flashy chrome attached to the UI in XP. Yes I know that you can switch to the command line or X11 in OS X, but I still want GUI navigation through files. I want the finder, I just don't want it to be slow.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Am using a new iBook 800, 640 MB RAM, 32 MB VRAM, 30G HD machine, running Jaguar 10.2.1.
It is actually quite snappy, per se, and some of the GUI sluggishness that I noticed in my iBook 700 with 640 MB RAM, 16 MB VRAM is no longer an issue.
As mentioned above, OSX is a RAM pig, and 256 MB is not enough, IMHO, to prevent occasional paging and HD thrashing -- minimum RAM for OSX SHOULD be no less than 512 MB.
Check out the 800 MHz iBooks -- very nice machines.
A PowerMac 8500 will run OS X. Just download this way-cool OS X installation aid, XPostFacto!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Apple's dirty little secret: sluggish Mac OS X still annoyingly slow:
a il .mgi?id=2452558.37935185
http://www.macdailynews.com/opinion/opinion_det
That's less of a problem with Jaguar, but it's still true to some extent, mainly because response time to mouse clicks is much longer on OSX than it was in OS9. In OS9, the time between the mouse button going down and some noticeable change happening on the screen was just a few milliseconds. In OSX, it seems more like several tens of milliseconds. It's a very noticeable difference. To see this, click your mouse fairly quickly, taking note of the "ka-chunk" that occurs where "ka" is down and "chunk" is up. Now click and hold on a menu in OSX. Notice that the menu drops down at roughly the same time that "chunk" would happen if you had released the mouse button. There's an obvious "beat" between the time the mouse goes down and the time the menu drops down. Now boot into OS9 (not Classic) and do the same test. The time lag between the mouse going down and the menu dropping is so short it's virtually undetectable.
On the other hand, preemptive multitasking kind of makes up for it; in OS9 I was used to the entire machine locking up when the mouse was down or certain dialog boxes (like printing) were in progress. But in OSX, almost nothing ever locks up the entire machine. Operations that would monopolize the processor in OS9 (like Acrobat when it's searching for a string in a long document) have no such effect in OSX--you're always free to switch to another application to continue to get work done. Those CPU-hogging operations are now very obvious and annoying when I occasionally boot into OS9.
Most operations that don't involve the user interface seem faster in OSX than in OS9. To me, the file system seems faster, network operations seem faster, and CPU-intensive operations seem faster. Whether this is a true speedup or merely the result of preemptive timeslicing I don't know.
The Finder is still the biggest problem in Jaguar. The OS9 Finder was a well-honed jewel of user interface mastery, having been originally designed by user interface experts and successively refined over a decade and a half. The OS9 Finder was a subtle beast: novices had no trouble with it and never noticed its deeper layers, while power users found that it was supremely useful at doing industrial-strength operations without getting in your way. In the OS9 Finder I rarely touched the mouse, so facile was the system at being controlled by the keyboard.
In OSX the situation is different. The Finder in OSX is pretty and it's reasonably functional for novices. But it clearly was not designed by user interface experts and it's not capable of handling what power users need. "Of course," you say, "that's what the Terminal is for." But in OS9, there was no Terminal, and the Finder there was designed well enough that you almost never wished you had one. In OSX, perhaps because there is a Terminal, the Finder's designers have not taken any great pains to make the thing usable to power users. For example, Labels were very useful to power users and they're gone now. The Open and Save dialog boxes cannot be navigated with the keyboard any more, like they could in OS9. (This problem was slightly addressed in Jaguar, in that you can now use arrow keys in this dialog, but you still cannot navigate the dialog alphabetically like you could in OS9). Window opening and refreshing in the OSX Finder is much slower than it was in OS9, and the OSX Finder is dirt slow when you use it to perform an operation on hundreds of files at once. Wanna see the rainbow cursor? Open your browser cache folder when it's got over 1000 files, select all, then hit cmd-Delete to throw them in the trash. The OS9 Finder was somewhat slow when it dealt with thousands of files too, but the situation seems worse in OSX. You'd think it would be better.
All in all, I think I'm just about as productive in Jaguar as I was in OS9. But I'd be more so if the Finder didn't suck so much.
Once the programs are up, I can work fast, but not being able to alt-tab between windows and alt-# between workspaces (and not having workspaces to begin with) bugs the hell out of me. THAT IS WHY I RUN ROOTLESS X. Rootless X is slow, but I use window maker, turn off all the options, and speed is unotacible (I'm a utilitarian guy), now I have workspaces, X, OSX, and anything else I want including Cocoa, Java, and OpenGL. I went back from 10.2 to 10.1.5, waiting for a better release (looks like since 10.2.2 just came out that time has come). In another year I see myself using linux, but while my computer is still relatively fast for its age, I'll continue to run the latest hot shit OSX system. Ultimately OSX works pretty much like any other graphics oriented bloat-ware system I have used (XP,2000,Magical Mandrake) speed wise, but runs much more stabily then any of those.
OSX crashes when I run OpenGL apps, and they freeze/lock or crash, otherwise it *NEVER* crashes on me. The trick with OSX is when you do media oriented things (then it shines), I notice a lot of speed with media and the sort, additionally it runs games very nicely (maybe not as fast as 95 or 98 of course, but it actually doesn't run all over your saved games with errors...). The trick with OSX (as with many a GUI) is to load all the programs you want right off the bat, put them in the backround, get done what you want done, close all the programs, and log off. If you load them right away, they are only an "alt-tab" (or two) away, and you never have to sit and wait for load, of course having a lot of memory helps this process, I run 1GB on my powerbook (not too expensive, life time warrenty, check out price watch).
The main advantage of an OSX system is you get it all. I can run anything from OpenGL games (like q3 or ut2k3 (if I want)) to office apps (MSOffice X, Open Office (almost)) to Xlib apps, to Cocoa apps, to fast simple free development (project builder, emacs, vim, make, whatever) and can do it almost as fast if not exactly as fast as windows, and still get the stability of unix! Like all things, it is a dynamic, there are comprimises, OSX represents one of those comprimises, one that fits me rather well for now, but it is not and can never be the alpha and the omega of computing, that you must find for yourself. NO reccomondation or advice or opinion will help you in that quest, only time tested experience, and practical observation. Peace mac-heads.
--"You are your own God"--
Your absoluetly right, of course this isn't the only reason it is / appears slow, but Stepwise (stepwise.com) did do a comparison and noted the difference reguarding how you setup your Swap file, they also published user instructions on how to use a dedicate swap partition.
:).
Having the Swap File on a seperate disk makes a big difference, even having the Swap File on a dedicate partition on a disk makes a difference (though of course not as much as more RAM
Though it should be noted that, IIRC this was still using a Swap File on a Disk (and not a Swap Filesystem) unless I remeber wrongly. The issue of having inreased overhead by having to do file IO rather than simple direct-to-disk writes is interesting!
The sad thing is that many media users would benifit from even being able to decide what disk to put their swap file on, but they aren't technical enough to be confortable doing it and the user interface/installer doesn't provide any easy way of doing it.
HERE'S THE TRUTH (john_at_petbrain.com).
... to make up for the fat GUI.
:) .. http://www.petbrain.com/images/macosx_kde3.jpg
... so you can use the KDE3 front end. :)
.. take note.. and APPLE ... thank you.
.. w/ Apple/IBM and the consumer.
I owned a 21in monitor w/ a rather beefy Athlon XP 2100 + with 512 megs of DDR. Complete specs are as follows:
XP 2100+
512 MB DDR
7200 RPM 60GB HD
ATI Radeon 7500 w/ 64 MB DDR
Basically, I a gear head when it comes to Windows. I KNOW that Mac OS X != Windows. So don't even judge me on this.
I switched to OSX for more pratcile reasons for programming, security, and all around use with Unix.
I baught a Cube (http://www.petbrain.com/cube/cube.html). The specs are the webpage provided. I was running Mac OSX 10.2.1.
It had an ATI Rage Pro 128 w/ 16 megs of ram.
AGP all be it, was damn slow! When I was looking to upgrade my $700 recently purchased cube (which I HAD to upgrade the ram and hard drive, because OS X was unbearable slow on a 5400 rpm drive w/ only 128 megs of ram).
I started trying to tweak the operating system with the given hardware. I know there are fits going back and forth with the community in hardware where RISC vs. INTEL processors . but basically I was atleast expecting a moderate speed comparison of a G4-450 to be close to maybe a 700 mhz or 800 mhz intel proceesor. This, I think is fair even to the purest of hardware guys.
So, with my 7200rpms and 416 megs of pc100 ram, I figured 10.2.1 would run relatively faster. I only got about 10-15% increased performance on a rather unbearable setup.
I started inspecting useing gkrellm, top and xload to see the foot print and CPU utilization to see what WAS the fucking problem.....
Thats where I started to understand WHY OSX is so damn slow, then started to get used to this with running alternative setups.
The problem with OS X is one thing. The GUI is TOOOOO FUCKING BIG! I'm sure there is a way to throttle the applications on memeory footprint.. but try doing that with Photoshop and Quarke.. ya.. ummmmmk. You don't throttle those things. Just throw money at it!
I downloaded XDarwin and ran both desktops at once with X11. Sweet.. but even SLOWER!!! I think I should mention here.. that ATI cards are OVERCLOCKED
OSX is slow, for more than just that. I don't think that Apple knows how to control the memory underlying system with BSD. When IE takes up 150 megs of footprint, AIM takes another 80 and iTunes takes up 140... you can see where im going with all of this.
I ended up running login required for my setup, so I would login using user ">consule".. then starting up KDE3
X11 for Darwin allows you to STOP the OSX GUI frontend
Much happier running better shit from the GPL. This STILL shows that Apple really needs to step a bit when it comes to application control in the memory system of OSX. Its slow because ideolgy at Apple over an issue like that. I'm unhappy but happy at the same point.
Unhappy because you have to buy a $1500 Mac to be happy OSX. I can't buy that because I'm a student.
Happy, because they are definately moving in the right directly using BSD.
So basically.. APPLE
Mixed feelings, but I think it may be marketing too.. much as how Microsoft did with the Intel relationship. Write bigger bloat-e-r applications to drive the hardware aspect of the industry. Good marketing... drives bad programming... its IT round 2
Thats my 2cents.
Yes, it is slow! On my 500 mhz iBook with 384 it's slow. Run OS 9 and it rips!!. iBook for sale. It's XP for me (with the patches....)
I have heard about Quatrz. Can you tell me where I can find it?
What are you talking about? The 75Mhz Performa was a Performa 5200/75 CD Rev 1. This mac featured a 75Mhz 603 chip. I think it's the only mac to ever use the 603 instead of the 603e. The 603 wasen't used very much because it featured only 16k of level 1 cache. In tests Apple realized that with only 16k level 1 cache (Split into 8 data 8 instrcution) the mac 68k emulator ran really slowly. The 603e had double the level 1 cache and was made up to speed of 300Mhz.
.. so talking Mhz on 040 processers can be a bit confusing. Same deal for most others.. By the end Apple was marketing them as 33/66Mhz machines.
There were two version of the basci 5200/75. One had a 2X CD-ROM with 8bit sound the other had a 4X CD-rom with 16 bit sound. I had the 2X version since I got it about a month or so before they were officialy realeased in the US. Both version of the 5200 line and most PPC performas were totaly crap machines. They were buggy and had absolutely terrible io.
Now.. as far as 68k prcessors.. the fastest 68k processor used in a mac was the 40Mhz 040 used in the Quadra 840AV. As far as I can remeber there was no 40Mhz 040 performas... The quickest one was 33Mhz I believe.
Of course Mot changed the way it rated Mhz of a processor. The 40Mhz 040 actually ran at 80Mhz but used a 40Mhz system bus.
Oh.. and MacOS 9 doesn't run on 68k machines anyway. 68K machines are limited to 8.1.. Which is a great MacOS release.