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How Windows 10 Performs On a 12-inch MacBook
An anonymous reader writes: As Microsoft prepares for the launch of Windows 10, review sites have been performing all sorts of benchmarks on the tech preview to evaluate how well the operating system will run. But now a computer science student named Alex King has made the most logical performance evaluation of all: testing Windows 10's performance on a 2015 MacBook. He says, "Here's the real kicker: it's fast. It's smooth. It renders at 60FPS unless you have a lot going on. It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X, further leading me to believe that Apple really needs to overhaul how animations are done. Even when I turn Transparency off in OS X, Mission Control isn't completely smooth. Here, even after some Aero Glass transparency has been added in, everything is smooth. It's remarkable, and it makes me believe in the 12-inch MacBook more than ever before. So maybe it's ironic that in some regards, the new MacBook runs Windows 10 (a prerelease version, at that) better than it runs OS X."
An apples to oranges... err I mean apple to Windows comparison in 3, 2, 1...
and my beat to shit 2007 DEL Inspirion 1720 Core 2 duo also flies smooth. Stange eh?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
There doesn't seem to be much factual evidence to make the claim that "It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X,"...
The claim, by it's very language deletes a lot of information making the claim worthless.
Unequivocally ... (says who?)
Better... (by what standard?)
Performance (by what metric?)
I know that this is probably just a personal blog with an opinion.... and he does want to quantify the claim with stats... but it's a bit too early to make the claim.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
... there's still a long-ish way to go until Windows 10 is out. And I'm afraid it'll come with surprises that we don't want (more bloatware? Advertising?).
I'm impressed by the performance boosts Windows got through 8, 8.1 and now 10, but unfortunately that is not enough for an OS. I'm uncomfortable with navigating the OS, something which should be seamless, logical and extremely easy to do; imagine if you had to think about every step you take whilst you go shopping.
I've also installed Windows 7, 8, 8.1 on a Macbook Pro and it's terrible. Oh, it is fast, trouble is the energy management is so poor the processor is overheating so the fans go turbo-mode. Not a pleasant experience.
I'll stick to 7 for the moment and OS X, they do the job properly without the hassle of a sad smilie BSOD.
Whether this Marvel is still smooth and fast!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
... for certain non-zero values of "no one"
... used as an exaggeration by every one!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
My beloved 7 crashed, bad, again, this past week and I finally decided to try out 10, I am running 10074 and it made my ....5? year old pavilion DV6 6135 feel like a brand new computer. It really is gorgeous and has a lower overhead. Not sure that this is relevant other than additional praise for 10, but I thought you would like to know.
Windows fanboys: We told you so...
Mac fanboys: Pfft buncha Windows fanboys
Linux fanboys: Whatever, Linux is free and runs on anything lightning fast
How is testing windows 10 on a macbook "the most logical performance evaluation of all"?
But does it run Linux?
Not "funny" dude... many people run Linux on Windows running on MacBooks!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Oh hey, this whole site is ridiculous, isn't it? Look, they talk about computers, computers cost money... And cellphones? Have you seen how expensive these are, gosh... Thank god we live in the United Federation of Planets and don't use this kind of thing anymore. Hey computer, where's my free coffee?
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
I wouldn't wish cygwin on my worst enemy.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
This submission (as some of the others recently) are there to troll slashdotters. We're being used as THEY know that there'll be factions and fanbois sprouting stuff about their favourite OS. It's a matter of respect and there is little of that around any more.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
So he did the needful?
At the bottom of the
Oh, it is fast, trouble is the energy management is so poor the processor is overheating so the fans go turbo-mode. Not a pleasant experience.
Welcome to the fantastic world of "embed controllers" (EC). The small custom chip sitting in the middle of a laptop, and in charge with all the peculiar functionality that are peculiar to this laptop, but don't exist in standard desktop/workstations. (like battery management, etc.)
The problem is that there is absolutely no standardisation of ECs. Every model is its own special snow flake (and when I say "model" I mean model of motherboard. In some case, specially consumer oriented laptop, some product range might have the same model name and the same plastic case and looks absolutely the same from the outside, but is actually different revisions which looks completely different under the hood, depending on which parts were the cheapest during the month this one was produced) (that's why for the same "Model" you have a few different BIOS downloads depending on part number, revision, etc.)
To get it working the manufacturer could write a specific driver. Usually this is done by the hardware manufacturer who write drivers for the target OS they have. Most laptop manufacturer write drivers for Windows, because they produce windows laptops. Here it's an *Apple* don't expect much.
To make things worse: usually these aren't your garden variety of drivers. Very often, platform functionality like ECs are handled by ACPI (now part of UEFI). i.e.: by firmware that is byte-code interpreted by the running system. In theory it should make things more OS-agnostic and portable. In practice it's a nightmare as every ACPI implementation is buggy in its own way, and every OS has a different variety of quirks. So writers of firmware (BIOS/UEFI/ACPI) for laptops have to release new versions of firmware (again, one per model of EC on mother board).
You can count on big brands to release a new BIOS pack download to cover the major flavours of Windows that they ship with this model. Maybe cover an update.
But don't count on engineers working for Apple to scram to release a new firmware update, just because some random schmuck decided to install a newer version of windows whose ACPI implementation is broken in a subtly different way than the preceding.
Their official OS that they support is OS X, they might have decided to add as a bonus a version or two supported as part of their Boot Camp offering.
And that's about it, don't count much more from them.
Funny that *windows* is now at the receiving end of this firmware/EC problem, that usually haunts Linux users on laptop that mostly run Windows.
(The problem that you report trying to run Windows on Apple hardware ? That's the daily plight of Linux users on most Windows laptops).
--------------
Also that might be the reason of the performance gain and "overall smoothness" reported by TFA:
- when running under OS X, the OS balances performance with battery life, thermal limits, etc. hardware runs at an equilibrium. Thus isn't as smooth as it theoretically could, because OS decides to save a bit power.
- Windows 10 has very probably an ACPI implementation that is subtly broken in a different way that its predecessor. Power management doesn't work. GPU is run at max power profile, CPU is run at max frequency. Results are probably smoother, but if the guy had actually carred to measure it in details, he would probably have observed shittier battery life.
Relevant quote (emphasis by me):
Yup definitely a possibility that shitty battery life and heat that you describe and the high performance that the author got are the
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Seriously though, I like the things Nadella has been doing. Reverting the Windows 8 start screen, releasing Windows 10 for free
Let's not forget that a lot of those decisions have actually been made by the Operating Systems Group, which is lead by Joe Belfiore and Terry Myerson.
A tribble drank your coffee and ate your chicken sandwich too.
It's nice to hear that Win10 runs well on a MacBook, but it's pure clickbait to claim that it "runs better" than does OS X. The measure being used is completely subjective. Microsoft and Apple might be optimizing for entirely different things. Without far more objective tests, we simply have no idea. It's silly to claim to have an objective answer based on this observation. Even the writer's claim that Win 10 runs at 60 fps turns out to be made up, because he admits that it simply looks that way and he hasn't found a way to test it. In other words, this is purely subjective AND this subjective observation about one thing says nothing about how either operating system performs overall. He can reasonably say that he installed Win 10 on the MacBook and he liked the way it performed. He can't reasonably compare the performance of the two operating systems, at least not based on anything he said here. Windows may be better by some objective measures. We just can't tell that from anything here.
I've recently installed the latest 64bit Windows 10 technical preview on a new computer running a gen 5 Intel processer with 6 cores and hyperthreading, SSD raid array and nVidia graphics card and the performance appears to be suboptimal. It requires DEP on by default, minimum RAM and other weirdness like specifying the type of cpu name (which I set to "core2duo") just to install but does allow all the usual hardware acceleration. I assigned several CPUs and a good chunk of DDR4 RAM to it with 16GB of hard drive space.
Running next to my trusty virtual XP windows 10 is a dog, even with all the settings for performance switched on. The integrated "search my computer and Internet" is painfully slow and the start button brings up this wacky osd box with embedded "metro style" elements. If you click a couple of times as it loads (can take any random amount of time) it doesn't ever appear again. I suppose this is a bug that will be fixed, but the whole thing feels slow to respond (including the mouse pointer and drag+drop snappiness). Some of this seems to be due to clunky design rather than the optimization of the codebase.
The only thing I can say is quicker is the startup and shutdown. I suppose the new "Spartan" thing loads alright, but I'm not a fan.
The writer is saying Apple came out with a MacBook that cannot smoothly run the OS that was preinstalled on it?
Frankly, I can understand if it was a 4 year old laptop with the latest OS, but Apple's usually pretty good about integration. Can anyone else verify that the latest MacBook that OS animations aren't smooth?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The pessimist in me says "That's ok. MS has plent of time to screw it up before release."
The realist in me says "You paid too much for the Windows laptop."
Isn't the Apple motto "It just works"? Not it works well, or quickly.
The optimist in me is still sleeping.
I refuse to sign
Windows 10 on a 12 inch MacBook? Can't work, it's obviously designed for a 10 inch MacBook.
Granted, for many users, speed matters. But, here are some other concerns.
1) The Registry File. Enough said.
2) Under OS X, open any kind of file in any kind of editor. Go back to the Finder window, rename the file, move it to a different folder no problem. Can't be done under Windows. Half the time, even after you close the file (not the editor app), the app fails to 'release' the lock and you STILL can't rename the file.
3) None of Microsoft's pseudo-shell implementations come close to bash/csh/ksh in useability.
For most users, most of the time spent on a computer is in dealing with the UI/GUI/UX (whatever you want to call it). That's what matters; raw speed of calculation is the primary need of a rather small subset of users (who probably buy time on a cluster node :-) )
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I'm not amazed. This reeks of the Microsoft approach.
- WMI is an acronym. Why is it in CamelCase except to make it the hard-to-guess impossible-to-guess? ...)). Is it because you have a numpty language or that precedence rules are hard?
- The processor is physically in my system, why is the parameter conflating "processor" (an element of an enumeration of physical devices I might want to task about) with an element of a separate enumeration (Win32 and other arbitrary subsystem layers/APIs)?
- Why does Get-WmiObject exist as an API into a WMI specific factory rather than as a general call to (Get-Object (WMI,
Ohhhh, old Slashdot - some things never change. Upcoming Windows release and "ohh so much true this Windows version is a best" posts, for one example. Sorry, people, Windows 10 is just rehashed Windows 8.1, with quite a few subsystems optimized. It is just another Windows. No, it won't convince people to switch. It merely will make Windows fans less frantic about not knowing what to do.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
CamelCase and every numpty that pushes it should die in a fire.
I am pretty sure it will blow Windows 10 out of the water and you won't have to do work to install all the extras (assuming you like free software). If someone gives me a MacBook, I'm happy to run this experiment ;-)
You can in fact run Mac OS X on a non-Apple piece of hardware. Hackintosh is how it's done. I am unsure of the legality of running OS X on non-Apple hardware due to EULA, but it is entirely possible and there is a small cottage industry around building non-Apple Macs.
Probably because it supports a lot of .Net functionality.
Tried that but wasn't able to get something useful from "cat /proc/cpuinfo".
I had exactly that experience! Though mine was on Linux and was one of the things that pushed me to *BSD. An unstable text-based format that varies between architectures and between kernel versions turns out to be a piss-poor way of getting information from the kernel.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It has long appeared to me that all the best talent at Cupertino is being assigned to work on iOS, and OSX is suffering as a result.
One upon a time, a new MacOSX release meant you might need to put more RAM in the box, but even some seven-year-old piece of hardware would go faster, and there would be fewer bugs or crashes. [Consider a late G3 iMac, upgraded all the way from Public Beta to Tiger.] These days, you put more RAM in (if you can if you have a machine old enough that Apple didn't solder all the memory in during manufacture) just to make it less sluggish.
Drawing performance seems especially poor, which makes me wonder: if I bought a top-end top-of-the-range Mac Pro, would it be any better at being a desktop computer than what I have now? I'm not sure it would.
Reminds of another study some years ago where WIndows 7 was found to be more secure out of the box than OS X was at the time, or for that matter likely still is.
Maybe there's a place but I never seem to see any info on who is doing the in house OS X coding, the age line, would be interesting to see.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Funny, that didn't work for me on Solaris, IRIX, or OS X either (you know, all real UNIX systems).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
It starts at the top. There's a reason why those things didn't happen when Ballmer was in charge.
I thought this "dirty regions" system went out of style with Windows XP in favor of Windows Vista's composited Aero environment.
we used to measure compute performance in flops or #tx/second, alas performance to get real work done.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears you're assuming that "real work" means batch processing. Dragging a window around is a test of the responsiveness of an operating system's event handling and graphics components, which are correlated with the responsiveness of gaming and multimedia production applications. It's in fact a form of the "#tx/second" you mention, as each frame is the result of a "move window object to these coordinates" transaction.
That's not how Windows works, it's not running a continuous render-loop like a game.
If you really needed smooth animation and graphics, Apple would tell you that was important and then you would have it. In the meantime, this is clearly not important. Remember it's much more important to be stylish and cool than effective and efficient.
That is the Trouble with Gribbles.
Respect the Constitution
Why not? Smooth animations make the computer relaxing to use.
More specifically DWM is the compositor, Aero is the theme. :)
So he did the needful?
Kindly?
Up until Windows 8 I would say that OSX seemed a bit faster and smoother. I've got an old iMac (circa 2007). It has 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. When I run OSX it feels slow and sluggish. I have it dual booted with Windows 8 and Windows, much to my surprise, runs much faster. It consistently uses 1.5 - 2 GB of memory. It never crashes.
It runs well enough that it is my everyday home office computer. I can do everything on it that I need. Granted, most of what I do involves connecting via Remote Desktop to someone else's server so I don't need a lot of local horsepower. But it's good enough that I can't justify buying a new rig.
20 years ago I was impressed when I was first able to move entire windows around the screen in real-time on a Pentium 90mhz machine running NT 3.5.1.
Today I half heartedly expect articles to talk about the responsiveness of calculator applications.
Any tips how to tweak Windows settings for non-retina applications? At work I have some Windows apps that I occasionally use from a Mac at home via VPN. They have worked OK although somewhat sluggishly on my late-2009 4GB Mac mini via Win 7/VMware. We recently got mid-2014 MBP so I tried Win 8 via Boot Camp but the initial experience was very bad: Win 8 Remote desktop client app's text & icons are way too tiny. One PACS client's image area is OK but the user interface elements are way too big so they fill almost the whole screen leaving only a small area for the images. The other PACS client severely crops its display area. It behaves slightly better if I adjust its window smaller but it is still unusable. I tried to tweak the "Make Text and other (Desktop?) items larger or smaller" and tweaked the resolution down to 1980x1080 but the results were not satisfactory. Any suggestions? Is Win 10 any better with Boot Camp?
Not just that, where is the evidence that Windows 10 runs better than OS-X on Apple's hardware? I run it on my Winbook, right now, it's okay, but still has enough bugs to be ironed out
If this is true, then in the long run it's good news for Mac users - it will spur Apple on to make OS X better. That's what competition is good for - just as Windows users are now reaping the rewards of greater Mac market share in having Windows get better.
I have never understood why Windows users wanted to "win" by having all competition sink without trace, nor Mac users for that matter. If there's only one game in town, why would anyone ever want to make it any better? Healthier for everyone if there are at least 2 viable systems, preferably 3 or 4.
Problem childhood?
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
I like Windows for Games, Apple for Graphic Arts, Linux for tinkering. Each OS has it's own pool of hardware it's been tested to work with, and each OS coder's have their own priorities, and deadlines. There's no perfect OS that does everything well "out of the box", it all depends on your needs, perspective, and budget. That said "dual booting" or booting an OS from an external drive are good, if not perfect alternatives. Just my 2ct's. :)
Apple specialize in hardware. Microsoft specialize in software. Is it really surprising that when you combine Microsoft's software with Apple's hardware you get something that performs well?
(My own experience with Mac hardware - as an IT professional in an education environment - is that it was better than the bulk of PC manufacturers, but not as good as the best. But that was years ago, and even then may have been biased by budgetary constraints.)