[GatoVolador]

So here I am at a friend's wintel vaio running xp, and I downloaded an aqua theme that makes the ugly interface quite more bearable. As I browse, chat, download, I notice the widely accepted views that web browsing is faster on windows. I get to use a filesharing client (winmx and morpheous) that isn't disgustingly slow, and may I reiterate disgustingly slow, as is Limewire on OSX. What I notice most though, and what I miss most on my baby down the hall (a PowerMac G4 500Mhz) is the responsiveness on this machine. XP isn't lightspeed fast, it has its slowdowns, I catch it refreshing generic icons with custom icons all the time, but when I go to click on a menu, minimize/maximize a window, move a window, drag a window in circles!!!, it is so much more responsive. Please, only serious replies, if both XP and X are "modern" and "stable" OSes, what makes OSX so unresponsive/slow?

[Sarc]

Maybe the fact that XP has 9 years of development behind it, against the 9 months in OS X had something to do with it.

Now, considering that X's interface is a multi-layered PDF composite Window Manager -aka. Quartz- I think responsiveness in the Mac is quite acceptable, put your venerable XP witha a similar GUI -God forbid- and see how responsiveness drops to dog slow ... while on the Mac it gets better with every update.

Sarc

[mudzilla]

Maybe the fact that XP has 9 years of development behind it, against the 9 months in OS X had something to do with it.

dude... you think that they've only spent 9 months on OS X? ever heard of NeXT, OpenSTEP and BSD? all composite parts of OS X...

[petej]

I think that Microsoft is much more performance-oriented, while Apple is more ease-of-use centered. Microsoft is extremely customer-driven, and with hardware getting cheaper/faster all the time, I think Microsoft largely tries to respond to customer demand to make things go faster. Apple is, I think, mostly driven by Steve's vision, and I think that Steve is not in touch with most customers. We get some cool stuff as a result, but we end up without the same focus on performance.

BTW, I use Linux for some stuff, and for some compilation projects, Linux is far faster than OS X; common source code builds, such as apache, mysql, or aolserver, go way faster on Linux than OS X. Again, I think the focus there is on performance, while the OS X focus is on providing a foundation for all the other stuff.

[Zadian]

Originally posted by mudzilla:
<STRONG>

dude... you think that they've only spent 9 months on OS X? ever heard of NeXT, OpenSTEP and BSD? all composite parts of OS X...</STRONG>

Mac OS X is not BSD, it is compatible to BSD.
Mac OS X is not NeXT. Mac OS X is based on NeXT but Apple has changed many parts of NeXTSTEP and these parts are new. Quarz is new, the finder is new and carbon is new - many of the major GUI parts are completely new.


Windows XP is a new version of windows NT and 2000. It's an OS that evolved over a long time into it's current shape.

[Jelle Monkmater]

It's a GUI issue. As stated above, OS X uses Quartz, which is new and experimental and has some terrific advantages in the long run. But is slower now in its current incarnation on current Macs.

I fully expect this to change not only for those who buy new Macs, but also for those who don't but simply upgrade their OS. Remember 10.0 and how slow that was compared to 10.1? Things will keep improving -- there's the window buffer compression thing, there's, for those who like to, the possibility to 'renice'the WindowManager, and there will be more to come. And if that raycer chip gets implemented, you'll in all likelihood notice another speed bump when buying a new Mac.

As to the slowness of webbrowsing: beats me, I don't see any difference between browsing with Mozilla on a PC or my Macintosh, but if there is, I don't know why. Same goes for the filesharing clients.

When it comes to slowness, I've not yet seen a Windows version that can have as many applications open without at least crashing one or showing some serious slowdowns as OS X - it's definitely the master in that area.

Same goes for security, if only for not having M$'s virus magnet Outlook installed on the system, though that's got little to do with unresponsiveness (though I've never opened an attachment on my Mac which tried to flash my BIOS chip, which, I've heard, causes a little delay in booting a Windows machine -- like till you get a new BIOS chip installed).

If you find speed a deciding factor in choosing an OS, go for a UNIX variant with just a command line. Speed will be unbelievable and Lynx is a damn fast browser too.

Personally, although I would like X to be faster, speed is not primarily what I look for in a modern OS - I would have bought a GHz WinTel box back when Mac was stuck at 500MHz if that was the case, but I didn't (I actually bought a 500Mhz beast), so it isn't. What I look for in a modern OS is a bit of freedom to do what I want (the command line & Developer's Tools, in this case), aesthetics (hmmm, lickable buttons), stability (yay uptime!), security (removing IE made my Mac an impenetrable fortress almost instantly.. well, nearly) and the promise that I won't be assimilated. Erm, I mean, I've been brainwashed to Think Different. Erm, or rather, I want to go somewhere else today. And tomorrow.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by mudzilla:
<STRONG>

dude... you think that they've only spent 9 months on OS X? ever heard of NeXT, OpenSTEP and BSD? all composite parts of OS X...</STRONG>

Responsiveness is a GUI issue, and OSX's GUI is new. Completely different from NeXT or OpenStep, and BSD has no native GUI of its own anyway (inless you count X11, which is itself not really a GUI, but rather the foundation on which GUI's can be built).

Quartz, if you recall, made its debut with OSX DP3, back in January 2000. While this puts it as having been in development for longer than nine months, it's still nowhere near as long as the Windows GUI system, and certainly not as long as QuickDraw. So give it some time.

[ShyWizard]

Don't try to get a serious answer out of this bunch of mac users
they would rather jump through a window into burning building than admit that their mac isn't superior

[Adam Betts]

Originally posted by ShyWizard:
<STRONG>Don't try to get a serious answer out of this bunch of mac users
they would rather jump through a window into burning building than admit that their mac isn't superior</STRONG>

I think your post is cute Keep it up. We need more trolls around.

[Eug]

Originally posted by ShyWizard:
<STRONG>Don't try to get a serious answer out of this bunch of mac users
they would rather jump through a window into burning building than admit that their mac isn't superior</STRONG>

I agree with this guy to a certain extent. Personally I don't care if you say the OS is double digit years old (BSD) or a few months old (X.1), but the bottom line is that it feels slow. (My hardware is in my sig.) I like it a lot and it's my primary laptop OS, but it serves no purpose for Macheads to constantly brush off its deficiencies saying simply that it's new.

So yes, it's slow. However, it has been improving and will continue to improve.

[ChaChi Boy]

Originally posted by Eug:
<STRONG>but it serves no purpose for Macheads to constantly brush off its deficiencies saying simply that it's new.</STRONG>

But you can't ignore that this is true. Quartz is under 2 years old!

When 10.1 came out a few months after 10.0 it was MUCH faster and things will get faster and faster with each update so we just have to wait another 6 months or so.

[mitchell_pgh]

If I would have known that we would still have MHz and not GHz machines in 2001, I would have jumped two years ago, but I am still here. I can still do things that my PC freaks can't.

[Eug]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
<STRONG>If I would have known that we would still have MHz and not GHz machines in 2001, I would have jumped two years ago, but I am still here. I can still do things that my PC freaks can't.</STRONG>

And vice versa. The key point here is that although Windoze is far from perfect, just because OS X is better in many ways it doesn't mean it can't stand to see a LOT of improvements in many areas.

When 10.1 came out a few months after 10.0 it was MUCH faster and things will get faster and faster with each update so we just have to wait another 6 months or so.

True, but I prefer to use my computer today. One can't wait forever for improvements. Remember it's been 9 months since OS X has been "released" and only now is it actually usable. 6 months is a long time, and in 18 months I'll be upgrading my hardware already.

[Jelle Monkmater]

Originally posted by Eug:
<STRONG>True, but I prefer to use my computer today. One can't wait forever for improvements. Remember it's been 9 months since OS X has been "released" and only now is it actually usable. 6 months is a long time, and in 18 months I'll be upgrading my hardware already.</STRONG>

Then you might as well have waited until you upgraded your hardware. For me OS X has been usable from the get-go, bearing in mind that I used Classic for such things as Illustrator, and that I could live without AppleWorks until 6.2 was released and it stopped crashing after one and a half sentences. But again: speed has never been an issue with me as much as it appears to be for other people.

Also bear in mind that although X ships with new computers, it's not the default OS (as I assumed it was in another thread). Perhaps we could wait until it is before concluding that for ever and ever XP will beat the crap out of OS X.

Alternatively, we could have a bare-knuckle fight between Mac and Windows users and see who's left standing. A solution which I'm all for, btw, after having been visited by a certain 'Dr. Watson' a total of 8 times on my NT machine at work today. And for what? For running an XWindow client to access my UNIX servers.

[ChaChi Boy]

Originally posted by Eug:
<STRONG>True, but I prefer to use my computer today. One can't wait forever for improvements. Remember it's been 9 months since OS X has been "released" and only now is it actually usable. 6 months is a long time, and in 18 months I'll be upgrading my hardware already.</STRONG>

Well you should have researched better before you bought your iBook then. If it is in need of so much more speed and improvements to the OS you could have had another PC until OSX is faster or faster hardware.

[Eug]

Originally posted by ChaChi Boy:
<STRONG>

Well you should have researched better before you bought your iBook then. If it is in need of so much more speed and improvements to the OS you could have had another PC until OSX is faster or faster hardware.</STRONG>

Actually, I'm being a little hard on the little guy so I guess I should clarify. I actually still prefer OS X. I just feel that the Apple apologists solve nothing by constantly giving excuses for OS X's deficiencies. I prefer to just admit the truth and try to work from there, instead of saying it's OK because it's new. However, I wonder about the logic about waiting 6 months for improvements. 6 months in computerland is actually a fairly long time. I just hope that OS X doesn't "wait" itself into oblivion. I don't think that will happen but I guess I'm just tired of the Mac rhetoric about how Mac is so great and therefore all negative comments about it are unjustified.

[ 12-18-2001: Message edited by: Eug ]

[ChaChi Boy]

Originally posted by Eug:
<STRONG>I prefer to just admit the truth and try to work from there, instead of saying it's OK because it's new.</STRONG>

You are missing my point. I am also saying on SOME computers OSX is slow but it is because it is new. I love it and I know it is going to get faster.

Having a valid reason for it being slow is not being an "Apple apologist".

[xi_hyperon]

I thought Apple shut down whatever site was offering an Aqua theme for Windows(?)

[Agent69]

Originally posted by mudzilla:
<STRONG>

dude... you think that they've only spent 9 months on OS X? ever heard of NeXT, OpenSTEP and BSD? all composite parts of OS X...</STRONG>

Just shows that Apple can take a good OS and ruin it.

[Jelle Monkmater]

Originally posted by Agent69:
<STRONG>


Just shows that Apple can take a good OS and ruin it.</STRONG>

*cough* flame bait *cough*

----
Pot. Kettle. Black. Me? Nah...

[Hemingray]

Heh... looks like somebody 's got a grudge against Aqua... and Apple?

[petej]

Originally posted by Millennium:
<STRONG>Responsiveness is a GUI issue</STRONG>

I've had a chance to run the Mach-O Mozilla on my box (a beige G3 300MHz), and for me, the difference in displaying web pages, with time measured from clicking the link until the time the page is fully rendered, is significantly faster than on the regular Fizzilla, or on OmniWeb (don't use IE much). I think responsiveness goes deeper than the GUI; to some extent, it will also take learning on the part of app writers as to what makes it go and what doesn't. Also, my experience on my old computer is that Quartz itself didn't speed up that much from 10.0 to 10.1 -- other things did. Actually, as near as I can tell, Quartz it pretty fast, especially on my non-accelerated hardware (unless I'm trying to do OpenGL stuff).

(Don't bother telling me about how my expectations must be low -- they aren't. For some reason I've never figured out, OS X was never really slow on my machine. It's never been as fast as the Windows machine next door, and 10.1 is much faster [snappier?] than 10.0 was, but response has always been competitive.)

[xi_hyperon]

Originally posted by petej:
<STRONG> It's never been as fast as the Windows machine next door, and 10.1 is much faster [snappier?] than 10.0 was, but response has always been competitive.)</STRONG>

oh-oh.

[Bruce O'Neal]

my complaint is this. os X is slower than i feel it should be. i am running a mac g4 (533 with 128 ram). i basically have no other applications installed (appleworks, and all the basic stuff that came with the mac), but not enough to tax out the system.

i am surprised that with that much horsepower, apple is saying that i need a ton more memory, and a faster processor. that is just not right!

i cannot afford another processor or upgrade to the fastests new mac (heck, this one was purchased this summer and was plenty fast under os 9+). however, i will spring for another 512Mb of memory, but they really do need to do something to speed up the OS. i jumped in with os x.1, and i am ever hopeful that my $2,000 purchase will not be obsolete by next summer because of OS issues.

[ChaChi Boy]

Originally posted by Bruce O'Neal:
<STRONG>
i cannot afford another processor or upgrade to the fastests new mac (heck, this one was purchased this summer and was plenty fast under os 9+). however, i will spring for another 512Mb of memory, but they really do need to do something to speed up the OS. i jumped in with os x.1, and i am ever hopeful that my $2,000 purchase will not be obsolete by next summer because of OS issues.</STRONG>

I have a 450MHz G4 Cube and it runs OSX AWESOME with448 megs of RAM. Your problem is that you don't have enough. You can get 512 Megs of RAM for under $50.

Give that a shot and then worry.

[Skywalker]

Read this article about one person's experience from a BeOS perspective.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=421&page=12

OS X is slower than it should be. In my mind, Apple needed to get very important features and functionality out in a tight timeframe. They didn't have the luxury of spending time optimizing the code and they didn't have much time in getting things right from the beginning (they should've but it's too late).

The slow UI is something that will continue to improve and I really do think it's because OS X is very young and had to be backwards compatible to a totall different OS. Apple's OS X team is not as large as Microsoft's and they had to devote a big chunk of OS X's development time in the past two years towards classic compatibility. I think we will see big software performance improvements in the next 12 months. Gripe now because Apple needs to hear it!!!

[theolein]

Originally posted by ShyWizard:
<STRONG>Don't try to get a serious answer out of this bunch of mac users
they would rather jump through a window into burning building than admit that their mac isn't superior</STRONG>

I hope that I never meet you in person. You are beginning to seriously irritate me with your trolling. Carry on and I will ask the mods to ban you. OK?

Eug has a point. The engine behind WinXP's interface is also new. GDI+ as it's called also supports transparency and is pretty good. I also think it ridiculous to continuously make excuses for Apple. I prefer OSX but Apple really does need to make improvements in responsiveness. Continuously waiting for something better to turn up is an illusion. We use the computers *now*, not in six months or one year. There are some technical issues that make window responsiveness better on Windows, lack of double buffering being one of them, but almost no one notices this and I think it was extremely short sighted of Apple not to implement options to turn off transparency, and live dragging etc. The sad thing is that Apple was so turned on by the cute rounded windows that they couldn't turn off transparency, could they? Apple needs to start listening to it's users again, and above all *show* that they are listening. I find Apple's policy of of not responding to user issues absolutely apalling. I don't give a flying f�ck what happens to windows, but one simply cannot deny that all the megahertz-myth crap and other stories are not helping anyone, especially anyone who uses a windows PC and simply notices that it does *appear* faster.

[johnnylundy]

Originally posted by Bruce O'Neal:
[QB]my complaint is this. os X is slower than i feel it should be. i am running a mac g4 (533 with 128 ram). i basically have no other applications installed (appleworks, and all the basic stuff that came with the mac), but not enough to tax out the system.

i am surprised that with that much horsepower, apple is saying that i need a ton more memory, and a faster processor. that is just not right!

It's true that you need more memory to keep the VM quiet, but I also agree with you that five hundred megahertz should be orders of magnitude more than needed to do basic GUI stuff.

Is Quartz not hardware accelerated - who knows. But look at the one- or two-second delay in resizing; can you imagine how many assembly-language instructions a 533 mHz G4 can execute in 2 seconds? And can it possibly take that many instructions to do the resizing? I think not. Somewhere, enormous amounts of unneeded and repetitive inefficient code is being run, probably in very tight loops. The answer is to get into the code and find the enormous wasted cycles, which appear because of the very high level of abstraction used in coding. Probably nobody even knows what machine language is being generated by the high-level tools used.

[ 12-18-2001: Message edited by: johnnylundy ]

[theolein]

Originally posted by johnnylundy:
<STRONG>

It's true that you need more memory to keep the VM quiet, but I also agree with you that five hundred megahertz should be orders of magnitude more than needed to do basic GUI stuff.

Is Quartz not hardware accelerated - who knows. But look at the one- or two-second delay in resizing; can you imagine how many assembly-language instructions a 533 mHz G4 can execute in 2 seconds? And can it possibly take that many instructions to do the resizing? I think not. Somewhere, enormous amounts of unneeded and repetitive inefficient code is being run, probably in very tight loops. The answer is to get into the code and find the enormous wasted cycles, which appear because of the very high level of abstraction used in coding. Probably nobody even knows what machine language is being generated by the high-level tools used.

[ 12-18-2001: Message edited by: johnnylundy ]</STRONG>

My feeling exactly. I know almost nothing about OSX's Quartz engine apart from Apple engineers claims that it is in fact very fast. If that is so, why is the responsiveness slow. What I find highly disturbing is this: On a 450Mhz PIII running Windows, A programm written in Java, using Swing (which is known to be notoriously slow) is no less responsive than OSX's Aqua running on a G3 450Mhz. Is Quartz in someway an interpreted PDF? (I am exagerating here, Swing doesn't support transparency I know). I know the window manager model is very complex and the scheduler influences this as well, but surely they are able to do some hand optimizations in assembly. I'm pretty sure Microsoft does that (apparently Office on Win has a fair amount of assembly work to bring it up to speed) and it would be the biggest single feature that Mac OSX users would appreciate. I remeber SJ saying earlier this year that performance would no longer be an issue with 10.1 and then showing off the 10.1 finder. The problem is that the finder uses a very poor hack to get around the responsiveness issue by drawing the whole window to the right and bottom of the present finder borders and simply clipping it. that will not work for most other programmes where the content is dependant on the size of the window.

Apple. do something!

[petej]

Originally posted by Bruce O'Neal:
<STRONG> i am running a mac g4 (533 with 128 ram).</STRONG>

Hey Bruce,

You're starved for memory. My experience is that anything less than 384M of memory isn't quite enough for OS X. If you spring for the 512MB module, you'll feel like you have a whole new machine --even under OS 9.

[edddeduck]

More memory the mor x.1 uses I spent some cash a cheap PC store got some Dimm's and hay presto speed machine well not quite as it was already fast bar Gui responce but dude memory is like giving Twinkys to Gengis Khan!!!!!

Blatant film quote there anyway I like OS X its fast enough to get by and in X.1 I have DVD again so I am happy.

Oh I know it will get a lot faster as Apple are winding down 9 development so have more engineers working on X and not 9.

Cheers and Shooch to the Nooch

Edd

[Eug]

Originally posted by Bruce O'Neal:
<STRONG>my complaint is this. os X is slower than i feel it should be. i am running a mac g4 (533 with 128 ram). i basically have no other applications installed (appleworks, and all the basic stuff that came with the mac), but not enough to tax out the system.

i am surprised that with that much horsepower, apple is saying that i need a ton more memory, and a faster processor. that is just not right!

i cannot afford another processor or upgrade to the fastests new mac (heck, this one was purchased this summer and was plenty fast under os 9+). however, i will spring for another 512Mb of memory, but they really do need to do something to speed up the OS. i jumped in with os x.1, and i am ever hopeful that my $2,000 purchase will not be obsolete by next summer because of OS issues.</STRONG>

Ack! Get thee to a memory store asap! OS X is slow, but it's gonna be all that much slower with only 128 MB. Get another 256 stick and you'll be happier, especially with your light usage. Fortunately, memory is as cheap as borscht these days. 256 MB PC133 SDRAM CAS2 should run you around 40 bucks these days with free 2-day FedEx delivery from Crucial. Check out the AnandTech Forums for a web coupon. Hell, I've got 640 in my iBook.

[GatoVolador]

Originally posted by ChaChi Boy:
<STRONG>

I have a 450MHz G4 Cube and it runs OSX AWESOME with448 megs of RAM. Your problem is that you don't have enough. You can get 512 Megs of RAM for under $50.

Give that a shot and then worry.</STRONG>

Whoa there, I've got 768Megs of RAM on a G4 500Mhz server model with a 60GIG hd. I would be lying to say it runs "awesome" Even with nothing other than the Finder running.