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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?
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.
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.
It works that way because that's the way NeXTStep did it, and I can tell you for most everyday interactive tasks (light web browsing, editing mainly text documents, ssh to other machines, some compiling), my NeXTstation (33mhz 68040 32M) is just fine.
These kids with their 400mhz G3's and 256M of RAM have absolutely nothing to complain about. You need plenty of power for the very latest games, but not a top end machine because games are written for the most common configuration, not the most expensive possible. The only people who really need power are engineers, 3D animators, and the like. Computers these days are more powerful than the vast majority of users needs, so why not put at least some of that power to use with a fancy GUI?
The biggest performance spong is Aqua's totaly absurd amount of iCandy.
After that we have
microkernal vs monolithic kernal penalty
overhead of dynamic binding objective C
Most of it is aqua and the windowing system. It's runs quite nicely as a server platform on any hardware.
nah...they're all just stoned
caino
Don't touch my
Nope, I'm just bored and reminded of my experiences with MacOS X. I can't see any decent reason to switch from Windows or Linux to a Mac platform. It certainly isn't faster unless I shell out two to three times more money than I paid for my current system and it has less software than my Windows2000 box does. What is it about rabid Mac fanboys that can't see that maybe some people aren't blindly convinced by idiotic "Switch" commercials?
The reason Apple customers are Apple's worst critics, is because the number one thing most Apple customers want is a decent selection of competetive software. If there were a wider range of software available on the Mac, then prices for the software would be more on par with what's available on the PC side. We pay more for software because of lack of competition.
And the reason why the software market is so much smaller on the Mac side, is because the marketshare that the platform has is very small.
Many Apple customers, especially Mac zealots, belive quite strongly that the only reason why the platform has such a small marketshare, is because Apple simply fails to execute on the potential of the platform. Here's just a list of perceived failures:
1. No cloning. (I personally think the ending of cloning was probably a good move)
2. The MHz gap. (The PPC theoretically should be on-par with Intel MHz-wise, due to RISC, copper, SOI, smaller process, etc. but Motorola keeps lagging)
2.5. Frontside bus technology about 3 generations behind the PC.
3. No PDA.
4. No strategy for the gaming market.
5. No strategy for the server market.
6. No low-end solution with unbundled monitor (monitorless iMac, or Cube-with-realistic-pricing).
7. No yellowbox-for-Windows runtime. (holy CRAP what was Apple thinking?)
8. The dock.
The "Mac faithful" are the ones who pay more money for hardware and software, and when they see Apple make a stupid decision, it hits their bottom line, but they're frustrated because for many - there's simply no comparable solution on the PC side (no colorsync, no consumer-level DVD authoring, etc).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"A significant percentage of the Mac user population screams if somebody in Cupertino doesn't wipe his/her hands after going to the bathroom, much less when Apple 'does something wrong.'"
Of course usually their "complaints" are just coy expressions of canine loyalty ("Oh no! Apple has removed the smiley face which displayed during system start up!", or "Apple isn't doing enough to market the Mac!")