The "interface" also includes things like automatically beginning a backup as soon as you plug in your external backup drive without any notification to the user (except for chasing arrows next to the icon), and pausing the backup if you un-plug it while time machine is running, again without notifying the user, to seamlessly resume where it left off next time you plug the drive in.
It's also using a new filesystem logging tool (called FSEvents) to fetch, instantly, a complete list of every single file you modified since you last plugged in the backup drive 6 days ago (which is quite an acheivement, considering the log doesn't take up several GB of space nor does it slow down the kernel).
Also, time machine is very intelligent about it's usage of space (within reason, it could be improved by slowing down the backup). Plus when your backup disk runs out of space, it gives you intelligent options for what parts of the backup to delete.
rsync is a wonderful tool, I use it several times a day and love it. But for backups it's nothing compared to time machine. rsync isn't going to run automatically if you have a drive that's not always plugged in (laptop? or maybe you keep your backup at an external location so it can't be stolen?), and it's going to harass you if you try to unplug the drive or turn the machine off in the middle of a backup, and it's going to take an hour to do a backup that might take 45 seconds in time machine (checking the modification date of 5 million files, then comparing each one with the modification date of another 5 million files takes a while), and you're going to run out of space in about 2 days if you decide to do *hourly* backups of your *entire* hard drive, which is what time machine does if you leave the drive plugged in permanently.
Also, whenever you install the operating system (either because your hardware failed, or you hacked the OS and broke something, or even if you just bought a new mac), you have the option of plugging in your time machine backup hard drive and it will skip the entire setup procedure, booting you strait into the same machine you left off with, all your software already installed and all your documents where you left them.
I've seen my mate upgrade his mac mini's hard drive in under 1 minute using a blunt knife. The RAM was just as easily accessible once the case was open.
Sure, that's nothing like my mac pro, where it's so easy you have to remind yourself not to replace RAM chips while the machine is running, but it's not at ll a difficult procedure.
I've seen it run on a 1Ghz G4. Some of the new features are a little chuggy (spaces, stationary in mail, etc), but it works fine overall. I'm planning to install it on an 800Mhz G4 iBook, I think it'll run fine.
Both of those machines have maxed out ram. I'd recommend at least 1GB of ram for average usage patterns, more if you're into multi-tasking.
As for features that existed on both Tiger and Leopard? Many of them are much faster on leopard than tiger. Spotlight absolutely screams on leopard. Results start appearing as you lift your finger from the key, even on the 1Ghz G4. I've uninstalled quicksilver, since spotlight is just as fast now.
Did you intentionally chop off the last few words in your quote? The article actually says:
"Overall, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is perhaps the most significant update in the history of Mac OS X - perhaps in the history of Apple - from a security standpoint."
I think TFA is probably right, security has never been more than an afterthought for as long as I've been using mac os.
It looks like Apple has seen Microsoft's security struggle with XP, seen the strong-but-painful security in Vista, and is building up a security model that doesn't suffer from the same issues Microsoft is facing.
Then don't open dashboard! It's as simple as dragging the icon out of the dock and disabling the hotkey in system preferences. Dashboard does not get loaded until the first time you click it (though from then on it stays loaded until you log out). I personally do use dashboard on my G4, but only with two or three widgets.
Tiger runs perfectly on my 800Mhz G4 iBook with 640MB ram. Applications take longer to open than my G5, and I can't play 720p videos (480p runs fine), but otherwise the speed is is perfectly fine.
I've played with the leopard prerelease, and there seem to be performance issues with "everyday" features like save/open on slower machines (but who knows, it's a beta! maybe they'll be fixed by the final release). I think I'm still going to install leopard on my G4 iBook, system requirements like that are rarely enforced and can always be worked around.
You make some really good points, and I'm willing to bet many of them will be solved over the next year or two. I'd like to comment on a couple of them:
Provide a *FREE* SDK for 3rd party development - all apple sdk's are free, they only charge for the conferences discussing how to use them. An iPhone sdk is almost certain to happen, and if the free mac sdk's are any indication it will be a state-of-the-art sdk when it comes. Most likely they decided it wasn't important enough to delay the initial release, a good sdk is very hard to build. It's not like electronics where you can decide to use flash instead of hard drives (ipod classic vs ipod nano) at the drop of a hat. An sdk has to be almost perfect on *day one* to succeed. If you fail to hit that your only real option is to limp along with it as long as possible, then throw the whole thing in the trash before starting over, which is millions of dollars in wages wasted. Once you publish an API, people will scream at you over even the tiniest changes.
Google Calendar Integration - To quote this article: "Apple's iCal, which is built-into Mac OS X, can be used to subscribe to your Google Calendar, and will automatically check Google Calendar every few minutes to check for new items." Apple is unlikely to ever port iCal to windows, but it's free if you buy a mac... you should consider an intel mac if the feature is that important to you.
Don't know about VAT, but in australia the answer is yes on the office equipment. I'm a freelance programmer, and I get 10% back on almost any business-related purchase (computer, office chair, phone bill, petrol when driving to a meeting, etc). In Ausralia, businesses send in a quarterly (or yearly, it's up to the business) report on how much GST they paid, and how much GST they collected from customers. If you paid more GST than you collect, then they tax department send you a cheque, otherwise you send them a cheque.
From what I've heard, the number of dogs that die after treatment are well bellow 5%, and many of those were barely even breathing by the time they received treatment.
Does placebo work on animals? I have seen homeopathy (Ledum 200 for anyone who's interested) save the lives of hundreds of dogs from paralysis ticks (http://www.petalia.com.au/templates/storytemplate_process.cfm?specie=Dogs&story_no=56), which are usually deadly for dogs/cats and can kill horses, cows and sometimes even humans.
My mother is a homeopath, and there are many, many farmers in this region who swear by homeopathy for saving their animals lives, they've seen first hand how many of their animals died before they learned of using homeopathy, instead of taking their pets to the vet for the antiserum, which is expensive, has a lower success-rate (especially if the dog is already paralyzed when taken to the vet), and can only be used once a year on an animal (if your animal has another tick in the same season, the vet won't even bother attempting to give it another shot, as it never saves them).
It's not scientific at all, but when you see hundreds of dogs over several years come back from symptoms that usually mean certain death, there has to be something there.
The problem is if 8 year old Johnny can't edit the page, he won't bother. Anyone can fix a typo, but if it's too much work they won't do it.
The openness is the reason wikipedia succeeded. Not because being open gives better content, but because being open gives more content, and more content makes it valuable to more people, and being valuable to more people gives them more editors, and more editors usually gives better content.
Also, you're forgetting: any page with regular vandalism does get locked down.
If I look around my (fairly small) circle of colleagues & friends who program, I can't find many people who's idea of their own skill-set is inaccurate.
Maybe I'm just lucky to work with the people I'm around, but certainly your rule doesn't apply in my office.
What it isn't (though I'm sure many will contradict this) is Windows "Administrator by default" mindset. That doesn't make it any easier for your computer to get infected, it just makes it easier for the crapware to hide out.
Another advantage to not running as admin, assuming your OS has a good security model, is you're more likely to be able to remove the malware by simply creating a new account and copying your documents over. It shouldn't be necessary to re-install the whole os + all your software.
Just because Windows is the dominant OS does not mean that we should therefore use it as an industry standard. Standards need to be developed for the industry as a whole, not just as Microsoft sees fit.
That's all very nice, but in some fields Microsoft *is* the industry standard. You bitch about it all day, but Microsoft Office is the standard, and until that changes compatibility will be crucial.
For example, at my job (web programming) I'm required to record the times I spend on each client, so my manager can invoice the client. My manager uses MS Excel, and therefore I must use a document format that he can open, even though I'm not running windows on my mac workstation. Similarly, my css and javascript must be compatible with IE 6, and my server-side code mustn't trigger any security warning dialogs under IE 7.
The end result is, wether I like it or not, I must use an Excel compatible format (and I've found Excel to work the best), and I must run a virtual machine to properly test websites in both versions of IE. Excel is a memory hog and has terrible workflow, and IE is absolutely the worst browser to use as a standard.
But microsoft *is* the standard, and many many people have no choice but to follow that standard.
I understand that some server rooms have hundreds of machines, I'm not sure how many servers we have in our datacenter (never been in there, not my department), but I'd guess it's between 10 - 20. Which would put the power savings well under $1,000 per year. I don't know how high our anual expenses are, and wouldn't be giving them out if I did, but that has to be a tiny portion of the overall running costs.
Also, I would think the only common reason to need more servers is if you need more capacity, in which case the performance benchmarks are much more important. And since we're talking about ~$3,000 servers (at least in our case), it seems to me the upfront price of an AMD vs Intel would be more significant than the power usage, though I guess it's important to know how much power each uses when planning your budget.
I admit I'm ignorant to the cost savings involved in smaller cooling/UPS system/etc.
Surely $20 -$30 per year is a joke in a business environment, my office would save more money buying slightly cheaper coffee than by moving away from zeon's in our small datacenter.
This is not at all what we're seeing with a UK based employment site with ~40,000 hits per month. What we see is 55% IE 6, 25% IE 7, 12% FireFox, 4% safari, and all other browsers below 1% (every browser from opera to lynx (!!)).
Why? Every other layout I work on requires at least a 1024x wide browser window, but if your window is smaller you just have a horizontal scroll bar. There is no excuse at all for having a site that requires a large display.
A site doesn't have to look nice on 1% of viewers, but it does have to be functional if you're receiving any decent amount of traffic.
"Not in the case of your iBook. Apple, and its users, are known to exaggerate their battery life just as they exaggerated the performance of PowerPC processors. Now that Apple uses Intel, battery life and processor performance are quite similar between Mac and PC.
I think you're going to do that regardless.;-)"
Lets not even go into bias, if you're not willing to take my word for the battery life I get on a machine I've been using daily for 3 years, that's up to you.
"Lord knows you wouldn't want to test on relevant hardware before making your sweeping claims. I suppose that proves OS X for iPhone offers power management as good as other smartphones?"
I never said it was a perfect claim, I was just giving you what evidence I have to suggest OS X has better power management than windows. You are correct to point out that I could be wrong, since I haven't had a chance to properly test the battery life of an intel-based mac notebook. I have a friend with a first-gen mac book pro, and it's battery life is shit. However apple's estimate of the current release of his machine is twice as long as it was when he purchased his, so his experiences aren't really valid anymore.
"It does? Where are the specs for that? Have you run benchmarks?"
There was a website at some point that listed the specs, I don't have it handy. No I haven't run benchmarks. However assuming the iPhone's has a current generation mobile cpu, it will probably similar speed to my sister's G3 iMac*, which also runs OS X perfectly.
"OS X existed in 1985?
I have no earthly idea what you are talking about, but OS X is nowhere near 20 years old with much of it relatively brand new. The iPhone's UI is entirely new and has never shipped in a product. The touchscreen hardware and the cellular radios are both brand new hardware to Apple and OS X."
According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT), work began on OS X some time between 1984 and 1987 (based on skim reading the article), which would put OS X somewhere between 20 and 22 years old. I write mac software in my spare time, and I can assure you that the API's developed in those years are the API's of choice for any software that doesn't need to be cross platform, and even that will likely change soon (the NeXT OS, was way ahead of it's time. It had features that still don't exist in the latest releases of windows/mac/linux). Certainly, it's not the same OS anymore as it was then, but the core of it is the same.
Certainly, some features like touch-screen are new, but others like check-spelling-as-you-type are ancient.
* no, I haven't run bench tests on that either. Which is why I said "probably".
Rah rah! Notebooks aren't low power devices in this context nor was OS X specifically written for notebooks, but if you want to believe that your iBook has superior battery life because it runs OS X then who's to argue with you
It has nothing to do with "low-power/high-power", it's about getting as much life out of whatever power you have. The OS is the only difference I can think of, both mac notebooks and pc notebooks are using pretty much the same hardware, and I can't imagine a good PC notebook ships with a shit battery. Unless you can give me an example proving otherwise, I'm going to continue believing that it's OS X vs Windows/Linux that makes mac notebooks have longer battery life. I don't have a mac-intel notebook to test windows on, but my iBook only gets 2 hours if I'm lucky under ubuntu, while it gets at a minimum 4 hours under OS X.
Meanwhile, suggesting that OS X is optimized for cellphones in the same way as Symbian or Blackberry is absurd.
OS X is "a far far more mature operating system" than what? OS X for iPhone hasn't even reached 1.0
The iPhone has a much faster CPU than the machines OS X was originally designed to run on (back in 1985). It's software like iPhoto that needs a fast machine, not the operating system. They won't have needed to do many optimizations at all to get OS X running beautifully on such "slow" hardware, which means they're working with code that has had over 20 years to mature.
Slashdot Mirror
The "interface" also includes things like automatically beginning a backup as soon as you plug in your external backup drive without any notification to the user (except for chasing arrows next to the icon), and pausing the backup if you un-plug it while time machine is running, again without notifying the user, to seamlessly resume where it left off next time you plug the drive in.
It's also using a new filesystem logging tool (called FSEvents) to fetch, instantly, a complete list of every single file you modified since you last plugged in the backup drive 6 days ago (which is quite an acheivement, considering the log doesn't take up several GB of space nor does it slow down the kernel).
Also, time machine is very intelligent about it's usage of space (within reason, it could be improved by slowing down the backup). Plus when your backup disk runs out of space, it gives you intelligent options for what parts of the backup to delete.
rsync is a wonderful tool, I use it several times a day and love it. But for backups it's nothing compared to time machine. rsync isn't going to run automatically if you have a drive that's not always plugged in (laptop? or maybe you keep your backup at an external location so it can't be stolen?), and it's going to harass you if you try to unplug the drive or turn the machine off in the middle of a backup, and it's going to take an hour to do a backup that might take 45 seconds in time machine (checking the modification date of 5 million files, then comparing each one with the modification date of another 5 million files takes a while), and you're going to run out of space in about 2 days if you decide to do *hourly* backups of your *entire* hard drive, which is what time machine does if you leave the drive plugged in permanently.
Also, whenever you install the operating system (either because your hardware failed, or you hacked the OS and broke something, or even if you just bought a new mac), you have the option of plugging in your time machine backup hard drive and it will skip the entire setup procedure, booting you strait into the same machine you left off with, all your software already installed and all your documents where you left them.
I've seen my mate upgrade his mac mini's hard drive in under 1 minute using a blunt knife. The RAM was just as easily accessible once the case was open.
Sure, that's nothing like my mac pro, where it's so easy you have to remind yourself not to replace RAM chips while the machine is running, but it's not at ll a difficult procedure.
I've seen it run on a 1Ghz G4. Some of the new features are a little chuggy (spaces, stationary in mail, etc), but it works fine overall. I'm planning to install it on an 800Mhz G4 iBook, I think it'll run fine.
Both of those machines have maxed out ram. I'd recommend at least 1GB of ram for average usage patterns, more if you're into multi-tasking.
As for features that existed on both Tiger and Leopard? Many of them are much faster on leopard than tiger. Spotlight absolutely screams on leopard. Results start appearing as you lift your finger from the key, even on the 1Ghz G4. I've uninstalled quicksilver, since spotlight is just as fast now.
The new 3D dock skin doesn't apply when the dock is on the side, since there were "vertigo" complaints among beta testers.
Did you intentionally chop off the last few words in your quote? The article actually says:
"Overall, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is perhaps the most significant update in the history of Mac OS X - perhaps in the history of Apple - from a security standpoint."
I think TFA is probably right, security has never been more than an afterthought for as long as I've been using mac os.
It looks like Apple has seen Microsoft's security struggle with XP, seen the strong-but-painful security in Vista, and is building up a security model that doesn't suffer from the same issues Microsoft is facing.
It's not fair to include OS X server when windows server wasn't included.
Then don't open dashboard! It's as simple as dragging the icon out of the dock and disabling the hotkey in system preferences. Dashboard does not get loaded until the first time you click it (though from then on it stays loaded until you log out). I personally do use dashboard on my G4, but only with two or three widgets.
Tiger runs perfectly on my 800Mhz G4 iBook with 640MB ram. Applications take longer to open than my G5, and I can't play 720p videos (480p runs fine), but otherwise the speed is is perfectly fine.
I've played with the leopard prerelease, and there seem to be performance issues with "everyday" features like save/open on slower machines (but who knows, it's a beta! maybe they'll be fixed by the final release). I think I'm still going to install leopard on my G4 iBook, system requirements like that are rarely enforced and can always be worked around.
GPS isn't required, all 911 needs is GSM localization. The iPhone does have that, though it's not being used by google maps unfortunately.
You make some really good points, and I'm willing to bet many of them will be solved over the next year or two. I'd like to comment on a couple of them:
Provide a *FREE* SDK for 3rd party development - all apple sdk's are free, they only charge for the conferences discussing how to use them. An iPhone sdk is almost certain to happen, and if the free mac sdk's are any indication it will be a state-of-the-art sdk when it comes. Most likely they decided it wasn't important enough to delay the initial release, a good sdk is very hard to build. It's not like electronics where you can decide to use flash instead of hard drives (ipod classic vs ipod nano) at the drop of a hat. An sdk has to be almost perfect on *day one* to succeed. If you fail to hit that your only real option is to limp along with it as long as possible, then throw the whole thing in the trash before starting over, which is millions of dollars in wages wasted. Once you publish an API, people will scream at you over even the tiniest changes.
Google Calendar Integration - To quote this article: "Apple's iCal, which is built-into Mac OS X, can be used to subscribe to your Google Calendar, and will automatically check Google Calendar every few minutes to check for new items." Apple is unlikely to ever port iCal to windows, but it's free if you buy a mac... you should consider an intel mac if the feature is that important to you.
Yep, you sure can. But if you run a loss 3 years in a row, they're going to audit you. If they decide you're not running a business, you're screwed.
Don't know about VAT, but in australia the answer is yes on the office equipment. I'm a freelance programmer, and I get 10% back on almost any business-related purchase (computer, office chair, phone bill, petrol when driving to a meeting, etc). In Ausralia, businesses send in a quarterly (or yearly, it's up to the business) report on how much GST they paid, and how much GST they collected from customers. If you paid more GST than you collect, then they tax department send you a cheque, otherwise you send them a cheque.
From what I've heard, the number of dogs that die after treatment are well bellow 5%, and many of those were barely even breathing by the time they received treatment.
Does placebo work on animals? I have seen homeopathy (Ledum 200 for anyone who's interested) save the lives of hundreds of dogs from paralysis ticks (http://www.petalia.com.au/templates/storytemplate_process.cfm?specie=Dogs&story_no=56), which are usually deadly for dogs/cats and can kill horses, cows and sometimes even humans. My mother is a homeopath, and there are many, many farmers in this region who swear by homeopathy for saving their animals lives, they've seen first hand how many of their animals died before they learned of using homeopathy, instead of taking their pets to the vet for the antiserum, which is expensive, has a lower success-rate (especially if the dog is already paralyzed when taken to the vet), and can only be used once a year on an animal (if your animal has another tick in the same season, the vet won't even bother attempting to give it another shot, as it never saves them). It's not scientific at all, but when you see hundreds of dogs over several years come back from symptoms that usually mean certain death, there has to be something there.
The problem is if 8 year old Johnny can't edit the page, he won't bother. Anyone can fix a typo, but if it's too much work they won't do it.
The openness is the reason wikipedia succeeded. Not because being open gives better content, but because being open gives more content, and more content makes it valuable to more people, and being valuable to more people gives them more editors, and more editors usually gives better content.
Also, you're forgetting: any page with regular vandalism does get locked down.
If I look around my (fairly small) circle of colleagues & friends who program, I can't find many people who's idea of their own skill-set is inaccurate.
Maybe I'm just lucky to work with the people I'm around, but certainly your rule doesn't apply in my office.
Another advantage to not running as admin, assuming your OS has a good security model, is you're more likely to be able to remove the malware by simply creating a new account and copying your documents over. It shouldn't be necessary to re-install the whole os + all your software.
That's all very nice, but in some fields Microsoft *is* the industry standard. You bitch about it all day, but Microsoft Office is the standard, and until that changes compatibility will be crucial.
For example, at my job (web programming) I'm required to record the times I spend on each client, so my manager can invoice the client. My manager uses MS Excel, and therefore I must use a document format that he can open, even though I'm not running windows on my mac workstation. Similarly, my css and javascript must be compatible with IE 6, and my server-side code mustn't trigger any security warning dialogs under IE 7.
The end result is, wether I like it or not, I must use an Excel compatible format (and I've found Excel to work the best), and I must run a virtual machine to properly test websites in both versions of IE. Excel is a memory hog and has terrible workflow, and IE is absolutely the worst browser to use as a standard.
But microsoft *is* the standard, and many many people have no choice but to follow that standard.
I understand that some server rooms have hundreds of machines, I'm not sure how many servers we have in our datacenter (never been in there, not my department), but I'd guess it's between 10 - 20. Which would put the power savings well under $1,000 per year. I don't know how high our anual expenses are, and wouldn't be giving them out if I did, but that has to be a tiny portion of the overall running costs. Also, I would think the only common reason to need more servers is if you need more capacity, in which case the performance benchmarks are much more important. And since we're talking about ~$3,000 servers (at least in our case), it seems to me the upfront price of an AMD vs Intel would be more significant than the power usage, though I guess it's important to know how much power each uses when planning your budget. I admit I'm ignorant to the cost savings involved in smaller cooling/UPS system/etc.
Surely $20 -$30 per year is a joke in a business environment, my office would save more money buying slightly cheaper coffee than by moving away from zeon's in our small datacenter.
This is not at all what we're seeing with a UK based employment site with ~40,000 hits per month. What we see is 55% IE 6, 25% IE 7, 12% FireFox, 4% safari, and all other browsers below 1% (every browser from opera to lynx (!!)).
They damn well better have someone who can read on staff. It's not as if the GPL is all that complicated.
LGPL is a little complex with regard to mixing it with proprietary code. It's crazy to blame them for seeking legal advice.
Why? Every other layout I work on requires at least a 1024x wide browser window, but if your window is smaller you just have a horizontal scroll bar. There is no excuse at all for having a site that requires a large display. A site doesn't have to look nice on 1% of viewers, but it does have to be functional if you're receiving any decent amount of traffic.
Google didn't write any of those apps. Apple did.
"Not in the case of your iBook. Apple, and its users, are known to exaggerate their battery life just as they exaggerated the performance of PowerPC processors. Now that Apple uses Intel, battery life and processor performance are quite similar between Mac and PC.
;-)"
I think you're going to do that regardless.
Lets not even go into bias, if you're not willing to take my word for the battery life I get on a machine I've been using daily for 3 years, that's up to you.
"Lord knows you wouldn't want to test on relevant hardware before making your sweeping claims. I suppose that proves OS X for iPhone offers power management as good as other smartphones?"
I never said it was a perfect claim, I was just giving you what evidence I have to suggest OS X has better power management than windows. You are correct to point out that I could be wrong, since I haven't had a chance to properly test the battery life of an intel-based mac notebook. I have a friend with a first-gen mac book pro, and it's battery life is shit. However apple's estimate of the current release of his machine is twice as long as it was when he purchased his, so his experiences aren't really valid anymore.
"It does? Where are the specs for that? Have you run benchmarks?"
There was a website at some point that listed the specs, I don't have it handy. No I haven't run benchmarks. However assuming the iPhone's has a current generation mobile cpu, it will probably similar speed to my sister's G3 iMac*, which also runs OS X perfectly.
"OS X existed in 1985?
I have no earthly idea what you are talking about, but OS X is nowhere near 20 years old with much of it relatively brand new. The iPhone's UI is entirely new and has never shipped in a product. The touchscreen hardware and the cellular radios are both brand new hardware to Apple and OS X."
According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT), work began on OS X some time between 1984 and 1987 (based on skim reading the article), which would put OS X somewhere between 20 and 22 years old. I write mac software in my spare time, and I can assure you that the API's developed in those years are the API's of choice for any software that doesn't need to be cross platform, and even that will likely change soon (the NeXT OS, was way ahead of it's time. It had features that still don't exist in the latest releases of windows/mac/linux). Certainly, it's not the same OS anymore as it was then, but the core of it is the same.
Certainly, some features like touch-screen are new, but others like check-spelling-as-you-type are ancient.
* no, I haven't run bench tests on that either. Which is why I said "probably".
It has nothing to do with "low-power/high-power", it's about getting as much life out of whatever power you have. The OS is the only difference I can think of, both mac notebooks and pc notebooks are using pretty much the same hardware, and I can't imagine a good PC notebook ships with a shit battery. Unless you can give me an example proving otherwise, I'm going to continue believing that it's OS X vs Windows/Linux that makes mac notebooks have longer battery life. I don't have a mac-intel notebook to test windows on, but my iBook only gets 2 hours if I'm lucky under ubuntu, while it gets at a minimum 4 hours under OS X.
The iPhone has a much faster CPU than the machines OS X was originally designed to run on (back in 1985). It's software like iPhoto that needs a fast machine, not the operating system. They won't have needed to do many optimizations at all to get OS X running beautifully on such "slow" hardware, which means they're working with code that has had over 20 years to mature.