I've been a daily, nightly DOS/Windows user for about 20 years. When OSX 10.0 came out, I was excited (having been forced to use OS9 at work).. until I realised how slow the UI was. When I bought an eMac with 10.3 last year, I was excited, until again, I realised how slow the UI was. This weekend, having decided that I've become too set in my ways, and tempted by the "ooh they're so much faster" lies, I bought an Intel Mac Mini (the fastest one they had), eagerly set it up, and .. it's still soooo sllooooow.
This is mostly because I am overly fussy when it comes to responsiveness. Thanks to my Quake background, moving my mouse cursor around, and typing text in OSX sets off this uneasy "YOU ARE GOING TO GET FRAGGED" feeling that comes from having controls that don't work quite right. I even get more satisfactory results on my Windows machine when it's running as a Synergy client, with the keyboard and mouse plugged into the Mac and everything being sent over the network.
That said, at least the Mac is consistently slow - Windows, in all its blazing 2D-blitting glory, runs crazy fast 98% of the time, and then produces freezing, blank-white-Explorer-windows of frustration the other 2% of the time. I'm also terrified of what might happen with Aero in Vista, whose latest betas run with the same thundering "wait mortal, I am rendering fancy effects" slowness that OSX does. At least you'll have the option of turning Aero off, however.
Still, as Aaron pointed out, I am doing this whole thing because I want differences, and so I should enjoy them.. More detailed discussion on pros (unixness, reliability, ease of use, spotlight, happiness) and cons (single menu bar when multitasking, quartz' font rendering) to come. Maybe.
2 comments:
I had the same experience (but much worse, even, 'cause the original Powerbooks came with 128mb and the agonizingly-slow OS 10.0). I solved it by putting Linux on it. ;)
(Unfortunately, even with GTK 2 the text boxes have some O(n^2) algorithm in the length of the text in the current paragraph. Which means that if you type for too long without pressing return, each keystroke gets slower . and . . slower . . .)
I feel like there's a sort of zen to using macs in general, though: ;ike how the mice default to being soooo slow, like multiple lift-and-drags across your desktop to get from one side to the other.
I wonder if the OS X people measure things like latency between keypress and visibility? It would seem to me there's probably a window of time where your brain interprets "key press here + visual change there = CAUSALITY" at a very low-level way, and presumably Windows is within that window.
Hey Glen, long time no talk!
I just bought a mac mini last week as well, this being my first mac tho, i kind of like the UI and the consitency (thus far). I went the soft option, mines an intel and i have XP setup on dual boot. To be honest ive not noticed a UI speed difference between the two, other than, as you say, the IE white screen of slow painful death. Im also kind of liking the whole being new to mac software thing, its like being introduced to computers all over again.
(why cant i post this with safari!?)
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