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Early Tiger Benchmarks Show Slight Speed-Ups
GatorMarc writes "Geek Patrol has published early speed benchmark tests on Tiger. Despite the fact that Tiger is still in development, the results are promising. Could we see a similar performance improvement as we did upgrading from Jaguar to Panther?"
built with the new version of gcc that Apple is releasing with Tiger. The compiled code(on both G4 and G5, moreso on the G5 which they used) is supposed to be much more efficient for certain operations than the previous version of GCC. Wonder if they used this?
more info here
Exactly. With Windows, a new OS release seems to mean you need to upgrade your computer. The history for Macs seems to be more like a new OS release allowing you to use your older computer a little longer.
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Kirby Reviews
it is funny..... someone was playing with my G4 400 last week and commented how it seemed a lot faster than their much newer machine.... turns out they were still running 10.2.x and i was running 10.3.x. i have to say i'm happy that 10.3 keeps the machine usable that much longer, i hope 10.4 is at least as usable.
Perceived speed is actually quite important; from the perspective of a personal computer user, it is quite possibly more important than actual throughput. It influences a user's beliefs about his own productivity on the machine, which in turn affects actual productivity. I don't know about you, but on a machine where widgets just zip, I work faster... slow GUIs have the effect of insidiously slowing me down.
Somehow the responsiveness of the Panther UI leaves something to be desired. (I'm running OS X 10.3.4 on a 1GHz G4/768MB RAM)
It is a well known fact that the UI in Cocoa apps are a little sluggish, and in some cases more sluggish than in Windows apps. High-end G5 Mac users probably don't notice it, but it is actually quite obvious on midrange Macs. One gets used to it, of course, and very soon one ceases to be bothered by it--but one cannot help but feel it when one uses a Windows machine at work.
John Siracusa at ArsTechnica actually did an informal test (on scrolling and such, somewhere in this review) and recorded the results in a Quicktime movie file. He compared the speed of Cocoa controls to Win32 controls.
This is also evident if you compare Cocoa to X11. Even the UI in X11 apps running under OS X is more responsive than Cocoa, especially in scrolling. I'm not entirely sure why this is but some people attribute it to overheads in Cocoa.
In my own experience, I have come to the (unscientific) conclusion that for now, Windows apps do seem more responsive than Mac OS X apps on comparable machines (1GHz G4/768MB RAM vis-a-vis a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4/256MB RAM). That doesn't mean the Win32 apps are actually faster, mind you, just that their UIs feel that way. This would one area where Apple could make improvements on, and I think it will.
P.S. Having said all that, Mac OS X has many productivity enhancing features that compensate for its UI sluggishness: robust and fast multitasking, extensive keyboard control, aesthetically pleasant UI, automation capabailities, exceptionally well-designed tools, creatively crafted free apps (like Butler and Tofu) from the community etc. Yes, I cannot deny that I am actually more productive and creative in je ne sais quoi ways on my Mac than on Windows.... for the most part, it's just more pleasant to work on a Mac.
You're generally right about "perceived speed". This article explains how:
10 Things Apple did to make Mac OS X faster.
So I think much of the perceived slowness of OSX's UI has nothing at all to do with how fast the machine is actually capable of performing the pretty functions, even on rather humble hardware (like my oldish iBook).
That and the "action-on-release" instead of "action-on-click" thing. It may make the UI feel less "snappy", since all actions are delayed by however long it takes you to take your finger off the mouse button, but it certainly makes for a more pleasant experience.