for me footprint is a big issue, leaner code means less things to break and getting almost 1Gb off an install is a big leap. i don't buy hardware to help run bloat so good work apple devs on slimming things up.

MS doing absolute min?

I think you see only what you want to see.

For example, have you tried Vista's speech and handwriting recognition features? Man, those simply rock. What OSX (or Linux) offers there is a joke compared to Vista, seriously.

Or.. transactions under NTFS (so that Windows Update can now guarantee that updates are installed properly or rollback all changes if one fails, for example)? That too is absolute minimum?

There are a number of operating systems that offer 32bit and 64bit versions: XP, Linux, etc.

So as OSX makes the transition and speeds up; it leaves the question - does OSX speed up by a greater or lesser factor compared to other operating systems doing the same transition?

There is room for a good article on this: pinning down the practical performance enhancement of moving from 32bit to 64bit operating systems; and suggesting which O/S are on the curve and which are behind it.

I wonder if they simply imported a lot of the changes from freebsd 7, or if that is even possible now with their darwin kernel?

"I wonder if they simply imported a lot of the changes from freebsd 7, or if that is even possible now with their darwin kernel?

Here's an interesting statistic, the /bsd folder of the XNU kernel tar ball accounts for 49.2% of the untarred size on disk.

Tests I've seen all conclude that MacOS is completely focused on the desktop experience, server benchmarks are terrible. Since they have (way overpriced) rack servers, I wonder if they address this at least a little bit.