Three reviews of Mac OS X Leopard, to be released coming Friday. David Pogue writes: "Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner. This Leopard has more than 300 new spots - and most of them are bright ones." Walt Mossberg concludes: "Leopard isn't a must-have for current Mac owners, but it adds a lot of value. For new Mac buyers, it makes switching even more attractive." Edward C. Baig of USA Today writes: "With Leopard, Apple's operating system widens its lead aesthetically and technologically. Whether the sixth major release of OS X in as many years puts a dent in Microsoft's dominant market share is another matter entirely." Thanks to MacWereld.nl [Dutch] for pointing these reviews out.
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Member since:2006-07-04
"Molly Molly Molly... Your "point" of course.... is just your biased opinion! thats it!! the FACT is that most Mac users (MOST) see a speed bump when they upgrade to a new Mac OS. and that the way it has been since 10.2. I am sure 10.5 will be the same! (for now... that just my opinion... for now)"
My "biased" opinion is that of one that's used and programmed Macs since 1986. I know of what I speak. And Mac OS 9 was faster than OS X 10.0 in mine, and many others (I'd say *most* others) experience. IMO, the perf hit was more than worth it (I gather from Vista users that Vista's perf hit is not worth it.) 10.1 was faster than 10.2, but still slow. 10.2 was faster than 10.3, but still slow. 10.3 was the first OS X with decent performance, IMO. Now, I don't run 10.4, but I know many have said that 10.4 is slower on their Macs than 10.3. As for 10.5, the fact that Apple isn't allowing it to be installed on lower-end Macs doesn't tell you something regarding it's performance visa-vi 10.4? It seems logical to conclude that since 10.5 has higher system requirements (for both CPU clock-speed and RAM), it would be slower than 10.4 on similar hardware.
Edited 2007-10-25 18:42
Member since:2007-06-20
I'm in a similar position and I agree with you 100%. 10.0 was a dog compared to OS9, and in my opinion OS X wasn't even a finished OS until 10.3. 10.4 is slower on my G3 B&W and on my G4 Mac Mini than 10.3 was. Also in my opinion, iLife is too slow on anything but my Macbook Pro. There is a reason they are cutting out the G3's with 10.5, and it's because too many features are going to tank performance. My Mac Mini G4 could barely do Spotlight.
Here is why I do not believe 10.5 is going to be faster: Apple hasn't been blasting us with "It's faster!!!!11!"
Member since:2007-02-17
Thats actually a bad assumption. The requirements could be there just to ensure support. Apple may just not want to support the older hardware. Even if the assumption were kind of true, I still find the requirements quite conservative compared to vista. Besides that there really shouldn't be any issues, if you don't want leopard stick with tiger or panther if it work well for you. Reports that I have heard from devs where I work say that the speed is greatly improved, the kernel has seen some definite love. Comparing OSX 10 to 9 is like comparing win95 to winXP. Yeah, Win95 is faster than XP but do you really want to use it?
I personally have seen speed increases in every version of OSX, if not throughout the whole OS at least in specific areas. I do have to admit that Tiger runs much slower on a mac mini (1st gen) with 256 ram, but then its my fault for running it with less than recommended ram specs. Overall though it still feels speedy when opening things and only gets slow when I have too many things open at the same time. I would love to see Vista run on something like that, it probably wouldn't boot past the vista logo, even Xp would have issue with that type of ram, it will run but would you really want to.
The point is that regardless if you believe the fanboyism or not, OSX is still much faster and more efficient than windows, with eyecandy on and all. Hoepfuly with the decoupling of the windows kernel from the ui, MS can focus on making things more efficient and with virtualization drop its dependence on backwards compatibility. I'm a Linux user but even I feel embarrassed for Vista.
Member since:2005-09-17
Member since:
2006-02-16
"My point, of course, still stands, that Leopard would appear to be slower than Tiger, particularly on lower-end hardware, since Apple isn't allowing installation on such hardware. So the claim that every OSX release increases performance is shaky at best. "
Molly Molly Molly... Your "point" of course.... is just your biased opinion! thats it!! the FACT is that most Mac users (MOST) see a speed bump when they upgrade to a new Mac OS. and that the way it has been since 10.2. I am sure 10.5 will be the same! (for now... that just my opinion... for now)