When it comes to Apple Computer’s new Mac Mini, beauty is in the eye of the person holding the wallet, says C|Net. My Take: I updated my blog with an… unrealistic hope for an even cheaper Mac Mini.
Mac Mini a maxi deal? Depends what you want
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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200 comments later.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-fedup14jan14,0,111456.story?c…
It’s too bad they don’t realize there are solutions other than Microsoft.
It is 1/16th the size of the 733 Mhz G4 Quicksilver running Jaguar, I am currently using, and with a similar speed as my Powerbook G4 (1.33Ghz) which runs Panther really smooth.
Man, I could reclaim my desk space by hiding it behind the Apple 17″ monitor! But I won’t, as the 733Mhz (32MB video RAM, 40GB original HD) is plenty fast for running Os X Jaguar or Panther. I can’t believe they shrunk the computer to such a small size.
It is the lowest priced Mac-not a cheap Mac. My powerbook and the Quicksilver with monitor cost me 2 Gs!
If you wish to test OsX, up the Ram and go for it, I say! You won’t regret it.
The best way to describe this is to quote what MDN has been attaching to the bottom of all their Mac mini articles…
“To really understand the Mac mini, think of it as an amazing $499 software bundle and OS package which is unrivaled in personal computing history that includes a free Apple Macintosh computer.”
That’s why I believe that the Mac Mini is powerful; it has the ability to empower its owners. It’s meant for people who think they only need a basic computer to write letters and surf the web. And those people are going to discover that computers can sometimes actually enrich their lives. And for those people, $500 is going to seem like a pittance price to pay for what they’re getting in return. They’re going to use their computers each day, and have loads of fun using them.
Good argument.
I´ll buy it when it will comme bundled with OSX 10.4 Tiger
G4 Power: Great post gankaku!
I find it amusing to see people complain about the “slug” of a processor that a G4 supposedly is, when so many people are content with its performance on even 400Mhz G3’s. Too many people subscribe to the Tim Allen school of thought when it comes to CPU speed.
I meant to say OSX’s performance on a 400Mhz G3.
I work in Pre-press and I can tell you that the average user will never feel like a G4 1.25 Ghz will be slow. You are assuming since the chip is a generation behind that it is obsolete.
The G4 chip is fast enough for the average joe to do video editing with iMovie (which my G3 ibook does okay with even with 384 ram) play music and surf the web. We are not talking Power Users here.
>>What are you doing to that poor G4? Editing 43 2100×1600 images in Photoshop simultaniously?
>Running Mail, iPhoto (just browsing) a couple of (idle) Terminals and Firefox (Safari is too slow) with a few tabs open.
Regarding your G4 Macintosh appearing quite “laggy”, may I assume you do quite a lot of tabbed browsing and that you never shut down Firefox or your computer at all but merely sleep it?
Try this out. Launch “Activity Monitor” from your “Applications/Utilities” folder press Command-1 to open the process window if it isn’t open already, slide the elevator over to the right till you can see the “Real Memory” and “Virtual” column headers and click on “Virtual” to organize the processes with the biggest users at the top.
Check to see if Firefox is not using a *humongous* gob of virtual RAM. (Or other program.)
OSX is really REALLY good and handling really swollen programs if the working set is small, but will cause switching to other pages/tabs/programs a bit of a judder as new working sets are swapped in from disk.
One problem I’m seen with ALL web browsers is that they all fail to release memory completely when you close a tab and are working with multiple tabs and windows. Even closing ALL tabs and windows does not free back the unused memory to the OS.
The Mozilla family of browsers are especially bloated with respect to RAM use on their initial startup (Just look at Camino’s download size for instance) , and I’ve noticed that task switching WITHIN Firefox (et. al.) gets particularly bad no matter what OS I’m using when the number of tabs I have open gets overly large, and can sometimes even spill out to other applications you are running- (Windows, Linux, OSX, BeOS before anyone asks.)
If Firefox is hogging a lot of virtual ram, just close it and restart it to get your swapspace back down.
If you really enjoy the multi-tab browsing experience and you use OSX you should try out the OmniWeb demo at http://www.omnigroup.com. It will still memory fragment but it’s the most pleasant browser I’ve ever seen on any platform and is far more CPU friendly than Mozilla. (Now at version 5.1)
Hope this helps!
“If you really enjoy the multi-tab browsing experience and you use OSX you should try out the OmniWeb demo at http://www.omnigroup.com. It will still memory fragment but it’s the most pleasant browser I’ve ever seen on any platform and is far more CPU friendly than Mozilla. (Now at version 5.1)”
I love Omniweb. Only browser I’ve found that’s worth paying for. Whenever I do browser testing Omniweb saves a lot of hassle with it’s editor. Yeah I know, Mozilla has one too, but it’s not nearly as easy to work with.
Anybody know when these ought to be hitting Apple Stores? Are they already in stock?
Honestly, I am not blown away by the “Mac mini” for its great hardware value vs. a PC. The price is not even that great when compared to an iMac G5.
However, for our small business, I am impressed enough to replace ALL the Windows machines that were used for personal productivity tasks at the rate of one a month with Mac mini’s.
As we can use our current — excellent compared to Mac — keyboards, mice, monitors, etc., the cost is reasonable. Of course, we are buying our own RAM. Let me stress that being able to use our own monitors is important. Most business content is not widescreen friendly and Apple’s focus on video for their monitors leaves business users out in the cold. We can get a superb Samsung 910T for $450 that gives us 1024 vertical pixels. An Apple display with roughly the same vertical pixel count is $1000.
On the whole, the Mac mini is a great machine. The important things are there — 1Ghz+ CPU, 1GB RAM, decent drive, quality ATI DVI output (Nvidia digital output signal is crap). The software is the best, the machine is solid, and the machine is quiet.
Bravo, Apple.
P.S. Of course, do work as hard as you can to bring out a G5 version of the mini 🙂
“Anybody know when these ought to be hitting Apple Stores? Are they already in stock?”
Jan. 22. According to reports, they are producing about 100,000 a month, so they should have them in stock when they are first released, and then run out before the first quarter is over, as usual.
Oh it looks cute and all, but it just really doesn’t have the power to do the stuff I need.
A couple of years ago, this would have been really innovative and new, but it’s more of a toy or add-on music player for the kitchen now.
Nice try, but it is old tech in a small box, and that is it…
There is an entire industry which produces those boxes, they are called silent mini PCs, the gripe is only that at the Wintel side of things you usually get noiseless small formfactor pcs not for less than 700 bucks. (and event those offers are dreadfully slow machines)..
If this apple box does not make any inroad with joe sixpax, you can be sure that the machine will make a heavy inroad with the miniITX crowd and homeserver people.
I know at least one other guy besides me (also from the Wintel Side of things) who bought this box for this exact reason.
Face it or not, if you are in need of a hush PC with a small formfactor, this box is a deal compared to everything out there from the Wintel side of things.
Thanks. Say, are you by chance going to be changing your name to TigerPPC in a couple of months?
>…you can be sure that the machine will make a heavy inroad with the miniITX crowd and homeserver people.<
The board/cpu/box beat the ViaC3 miniITX boards and boxes in specs and formfactor, but there’s only one NIC. I don’t know, but doubt there’s any way to add another. So while this could serve files/printers on your LAN via a switch or hub, you’d need something else for an internet router, proxy server, etc.
Does anyone know if you can utilize any of the onboard USB or Firewire ports to connect to a LAN or xDSL modem? Perhaps there are adapters that would enable you to use either a USB or the Firewire to connect to the LAN, thus freeing up the onboard NIC for connection to the broadband modem.
Even my Dell D800 laptop can connect to the LAN via the firewire port (no adapter needed), so I would be downright shocked if a Mac couldn’t do the same thing.
But I see Apple NZ is charging almost $950 NZD for the same machine. That is, um, almost $250 ABOVE the USA price.
According to apple.co.nz it’s NZ $843.56, not 950. Still a bit high, though…. The NZ penalty is unproportionally large it seems. Maybe it is a way to “moderate” the sales, in order to be able to deliver…
WHERE THE HELL IS THE TV TUNER!?
Add this, and you’ll have it…
http://www.navination.net/design/concepts/machtpc.png
Just a little concept pic I composed in Photoshop…
“Thanks. Say, are you by chance going to be changing your name to TigerPPC in a couple of months?”
No problem. lol, I haven’t even thought about the name though. PantherPPC used to be my AIM screen name too, but people kept IMing me and asking questions. I’m happy to help, but there were over a dozen people trying to use me as tech support.
Well I was going on the Apple store price and online Australian prices.
Perhaps I need a new supplier (!) but at least here in Australia I’ve not seen them priced accordingly. One site seemed to be about 1.5 times the cost of two 512 sticks.
I always wonder what people use their PC for when they claim the Mac Mini isn’t powerful enough to do what they want to.
I use an iBook with a 1.2GHz G4 and 768MB of RAM, and I can do just about anything. Sure, games don’t figure highly, but I rarely play them these days. I push it pretty hard and it comes through like a champ.
So what are people needing to do that the Mac Mini can’t? Leaving the arena of games aside, that is.
“It is a known fact that OSX is far superior to windows when it comes to multitasking.”
Another blanket exageration. And why and how is it so superior? (Technical reasons, not empirical data about how you and all your friends “feel” it’s so much faster.) You’re not doing the Mac any good by making outrageous claims that have no merit.
Write software and encode video. Plus, I didn’t even realize that the mini-mac has a 4200RPM hdd. That will make it extraordinarily slow for what I want to do. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t use a laptop for development anymore. Couldn’t stand the hdd slowness. They should’ve made the mini-mac slightly bigger and used a fast 7200RPM hdd. (I can’t even stand my sister’s Celeron 1.X Ghz machine with a 5400 RPM hdd.) With the cost savings, they might be able to throw in another 256MB of ram and made the machine tolerable to me.
So what are people needing to do that the Mac Mini can’t? Leaving the arena of games aside, that is.
Quote: you’re not doing the Mac any good by making outrageous claims that have no merit.
He’s doing the Mac plenty good, and his claims have merit. You know what is a time waster, when one side tries to speak for the other side.
Here is a word: disingenuous.
Sorry to rant, but I’ve just spent an hour surfing reading people talk about this or that, and I’ve come to a conclusion. There is a myth constantly being spread around that Mac fan’s are harming apple. The people who bought Mac’s and told the truth about the Mac platforms positives (like the world class BSD Unix multitasking core of Mac OS X) didn’t harm the platform.
I repeat Mac fanatics are in NO WAY harming the platform…this bit of junior psychology is OLD, OLD OLD, and shame on you. Shame on you for not having anything useful to say, and drudging out that tired old myth out once again, for me to read for the 500th time today.
I am not a fan boy of the windows field or the Mac field but… I am an owner of an ibook g3 600mhz with 640mb of ram..
I first thought the ibook would be fast, surfing the web, doing word and basically doing a bit of coding. Yes, the laptop is slow, running fire fox, using itunes is slow, it lags to open. The hard drive makes a lot of noise accessing data. No i am not happy with it, but FUD it, it’s a laptop, it works and if i bitch any longer its not going to change anything.
This is just MY experience with my ibook.
if your going to bitch at me, then I suggest you go ahead, but its pointless, since I don’t particularly care.
“No i am not happy with it, but FUD it, it’s a laptop”
You certainly have a right to speak your mind and all, but do you know what FUD stands for? I ask because that sentence didn’t really make sense.
http://www.elgato.com/
Just because I saw some people asking for it. Check it out. Do not know how good or bad it is.
My current machine, which is NO SLOUCH… Does not meet the minimum standards for Longhorn.
FUD. No minimum standards for Longhorn have even been published yet (and current Longhorn betas will run on PCs that are ~5 years old _now_).
Check to see if Firefox is not using a *humongous* gob of virtual RAM. (Or other program.)
Firefox does indeed chew up massive amounts of RAM. This is true (as you’ve noted) for it on all platforms.
However, even when it’s got a few hundred MB of VM allocated, it’s *still* faster than Safari (and both are substantially slower than Firefox on a similarly (1Ghz P3) powered PC).
This also doesn’t account for swapping between applications & general UI lagginess (menus, etc).
My iBook has 768MB of RAM. With the relatively light tasks I usually perform in it, swapping is simply not an issue. Added to that, I see the same lagginess on machines that are *much* more powerful. The problem isn’t the hardware, it’s the OS.
Hope this helps!
Thanks for your suggestions. I haven’t looked at Omniweb for a couple of years now, so I might give it another go for a few weeks and see how it is.
OSX Hides its lag? users unconsciously work around lag?
[Exposé] disguising the app-switch lag?
Yes. The 0.5 – 1 second delay that window zoom takes (which is handled solely by the video card) hides the delay in the OS switching betwen tasks. If you just switch between windows by clicking on them (or alt+tabbing) the delay is far more noticable.
It is a known fact that OSX is far superior to windows when it comes to multitasking.
“Well known” by Mac zealots maybe.
Yes. The 0.5 – 1 second delay that window zoom takes (which is handled solely by the video card) hides the delay in the OS switching betwen tasks. If you just switch between windows by clicking on them (or alt+tabbing) the delay is far more noticable.
On my old Powermac 333 Mhz I experience practically no delay when switching between applications using mouse clicks. It’s faster at switching between apps than my Celeron 2.6 GHz next to me using WinXP, because it doesn’t spend time redrawing windows, but merely switches layers. That’s pretty impressive, as I’m running OSX in 1600×1200 on a 6 MB ATI Rage Pro card. Using CMD-Tab is indeed much slower though.
You should also count in swapping to and from HD if you have a lot of apps running. Maybe that’s what slowing down.
Windows is a decent operating system (way superior to DOS :-)). I said that I was a windows user. But common. You cannot compare windows to OS X. I give it to Apple users, OS X is a superior OS. However, I sometimes dont see people giving credit to windows. Do you imagine how many combinations of posible hardwares are on PC. Woooo. X!. Being X a huge number. And Windows works decent in most of them. OS X is set to be used in an especific hardware. Both are good. If you like windows, keep using hopefully Longhorn will come. If you like Mac, enjoy when Tiger comes. If you like both, (like me) just enjoy the best of both worlds.
“FUD. No minimum standards for Longhorn have even been published yet (and current Longhorn betas will run on PCs that are ~5 years old _now_).”
They’ve been posted a number of times, and they change every time. Longhorn is supposed to cut back on the GUI effects for older machines.
“However, even when it’s got a few hundred MB of VM allocated, it’s *still* faster than Safari (and both are substantially slower than Firefox on a similarly (1Ghz P3) powered PC).”
Don’t know where you’re getting that impression from. I can hardly tell the difference.
As for the GUI hiding app switching performance, try turning the effects off. It’s instant.
“Another blanket exageration. And why and how is it so superior? (Technical reasons, not empirical data about how you and all your friends “feel” it’s so much faster.)”
Opinions aside, there’s not much out there that compares the two, with the exception of Microsofts’ and Apples’ websites.
” “Well known” by Mac zealots maybe.”
From personal experience, I’ve found most people consider BSD to have better multitasking than XP.
“He’s doing the Mac plenty good, and his claims have merit.”
Such as? What technical reasons make Mac OS X far superior at multitasking than Windows? And I mean not just a little superior or even a little bit better. I mean “far superior” as a “fact”.
“You know what is a time waster, when one side tries to speak for the other side.”
You’re way off base. If anything I’m a Linux supporter so I wouldn’t fit on any side. In fact, I’m neutral and unbiased.
“Here is a word: disingenuous.”
Great word. I don’t think you understand what it means otherwise, you wouldn’t pick that word to use against me.
“There is a myth constantly being spread around that Mac fan’s are harming apple. The people who bought Mac’s and told the truth about the Mac platforms positives (like the … I repeat Mac fanatics are in NO WAY harming the platform…this bit of junior psychology is OLD, OLD OLD, and shame on you. Shame on you for not having anything useful to say, and drudging out that tired old myth out once again, for me to read for the 500th time today.”
You need to stop exaggerating my comments. First of all, your paragraph above does not reflect my views. In fact, I never even used the word “harm” in my post. Writing an entire paragraph of fluff and then attributing it to someone that didn’t say as much is what? What’s the word? dis-en-what?
All I said was that it doesn’t “help” the Mac platform. Mostly because outrageous comments like that will be ignored by people with common sense and does nothing to further your “cause” so to speak.
“No other machine can edit HD cheaply and easily as this with iMovie HD or spending a few hundred dollars more for Final Cut Express HD.”
Theoretically, yes, you can, but seeing how long it takes to render SD on a G4, I wouldn’t much care to try HD, especially with just 256MB
They’ve been posted a number of times, and they change every time. Longhorn is supposed to cut back on the GUI effects for older machines.
No, a few guesses has been reposted a number of times. No official specifications have been published.
Don’t know where you’re getting that impression from. I can hardly tell the difference.
Load up a big (1000+ posts) slashdot thread and scroll through it by pushing the space bar a few times.
From personal experience, I’ve found most people consider BSD to have better multitasking than XP.
OS X is not BSD. Incidentally, I think you’ll find most people who talk about “multitasking” on BSD are talking about a very different thing to interactive GUI performance.
I’m getting the distinct impression from some people that they do their cpu comparisons like this:
1. fastest intel is a p4 and the fastest mac is a G5
2. therefor p4 == g5
3. if we go from a g5 to a g4 that’s -1
4. so p4 – 1 = p3
Conclusion: g4 == p3
Some people really need to step away from their keyboard and find another hobby, preferably handling tools stripped from their warning labels.
Pposted by xengren.
Another blanket exageration. And why and how is it so superior? (Technical reasons, not empirical data about how you and all your friends “feel” it’s so much faster.)
Sure thing.
heres a few features for you to research.
PowerPC RISC cpu
Dynamic memory management
Preemptive Multitasking
AltiVec (SIMD)
Add the dual CPU form factor in this argument and things look even more impressive: A dual RISC, symmetric multiprocessing, preemptive Multitasking, Altivec and dynamic memory management enabled system.
http://www.google.com
Hardly a blanket exaggeration
Hey E thats scary how good that looks! I wonder what Apple could have done if they made the Mac mini 4″ high instead of just 2″. I think that they have just moved into a new form factor as far as Apple is concerned. Its been done for awhile on the PC side but even the smallest ITX systems aren’t as smooth looking as the Mini and even if they are I do not know the any that have had widespread popularity or appeal to PC users.
The Mini is already back logged for 3-4 weeks! If these prove to be at least 1/4 as successful as the iPod then Apple will have another hit on their hands and this is just the beginning of the year.
I hope that with the Mini Apple will shorten their upgrade cycle for this product from one year to six months. The G4 is more than capable of running MacOSX. Even a G3 can handle it given that you have the memory and a good GPU.
“No, a few guesses has been reposted a number of times. No official specifications have been published.”
I could’ve sworn MS has talked about them before, obviously not officially posted as the OS is nowhere near ready to be released. As for Longhorn not working on current hardware, how could it not? They have to develop it on something.
“Load up a big (1000+ posts) slashdot thread and scroll through it by pushing the space bar a few times.”
Just tried it. It was the same on both browsers, with and without smooth scrolling turned on. Also to note (might make a difference, might not) Firefox uses it’s own smooth scrolling and not the built in smooth scrolling that the rest of the OS uses.
“OS X is not BSD. Incidentally, I think you’ll find most people who talk about “multitasking” on BSD are talking about a very different thing to interactive GUI performance.”
I used BSD instead of OS X because it’s the closest thing I could find that people compared. The point remains, there hasn’t been a lot of testing comparing XP to OS X.
“Sure thing.
heres a few features for you to research.
PowerPC RISC cpu
Dynamic memory management
Preemptive Multitasking
AltiVec (SIMD) ”
First of all, the AltiVec engine is part of the PowerPC CPU and it’s not a feature of Mac OS. Furthermore, it doesn’t really help for multitasking. SIMD is a form of parallel processing and is only useful for certain things such as multimedia. Not to mention that Intel and AMD have simular instruction sets such as 3D Now and SSE. Furthermore, the PowerPC is not a feature of Mac OS X either. Windows NT also runs on PowerPC. So those two points are invalid. Not to mention that a RISC cpu doesn’t necessarily mean better performance. Intel and AMD CPUs are considered CISC and they benchmark much better. Also, AMD has been using a RISC/CISC hybrid model for some time now so not all of their CPUs are purely CISC.
Premptive multitasking has been a feature of Windows for a long time. So that’s not an advantage for Mac OS X either.
Define “dynamic memory management” because it’s a loose term that can mean a lot of things. If you mean virtual memory, then Windows also has this feature.
“Add the dual CPU form factor in this argument and things look even more impressive: A dual RISC, symmetric multiprocessing, preemptive Multitasking, Altivec and dynamic memory management enabled system.”
Sorry, but Windows also has SMP support, preemptive multitasking, and can use SIMD extensions. Even though those are not features of the OS.
And even if I give you “dynamic memory management” which I don’t know what you mean by it, it’s still doesn’t make it “far superior” because one style of memory management doesn’t automatically equate to better multitasking.
I’m willing to believe if you have the evidence. Do some more research and come back to me.
“I’m willing to believe if you have the evidence. Do some more research and come back to me.
”
Hmmm. Thinking on that one, as no one can seem to find any research on the subject. So now I’m trying to think up my own test, and software seems to be the factor that messes up every test I can come up with. And then it gets me thinking, no wonder there’s no research on this. Just experience. Mine tells me that XP slows down signifigantly when it has to handle multiple heavy loads, but knowledge tells me that it could just as easily be an inherent problem of the x86 architecture, or maybe it’s just Intel, and AMD has worked around it. But maybe it is XPs fault. There are just too many variables in that equation. And then I think, well, it’s not IBMs fault because PPC handles multiple heavy loads fine, as does OS X. Less variables seems to mean less possible problems. It works, and so does the alternative if it’s set up properly, or not, if it is in fact XPs fault and not Intel or x86. So say it’s Intels fault, XP works fine, and AMD works fine. Hmm, cuts the ‘choice of vendors’ thing down a bit, huh? All speculation of course. But then if it worked fine on any setup, nobody would complain, would they? Anyhow, use what works best for you, because the experience is the most important aspect. I’m leaving this topic alone for fear of another half-assed rant on my part.
well back in the day startingwith win 98 and os 8.X – 9 several multitasks reviews were done all showing windows seemed to hanble multitasking much better. And now it is not an issue?…
Tell you what want multitaking test get 4 or 5 different video players running different video on a high end PC and a HIGH end mac, tell me that you get when switching between video.
I can tell you from expereince of a dual 1.8 G5 with a gig of ram there is not 1 studder in any of the movies playing. 1 even being DV from a camcorder uncompressed.
I would not even attempt that with my athlon 2400 system
posted by xengren
First of all, the AltiVec engine is part of the PowerPC CPU and it’s not a feature of Mac OS. Furthermore, it doesn’t really help for multitasking. SIMD is a form of parallel processing and is only useful for certain things such as multimedia. Not to mention that Intel and AMD have simular instruction sets such as 3D Now and SSE. Furthermore, the PowerPC is not a feature of Mac OS X either.
Seeing as OSX is tied to Apple hardware in every sense, I would have thought it to be quite obvious why RISC, Altivec, PPC etc are used to describe Macintosh Multitasking.
What is obvious however, is that these facts are not so obvious to some people :/
Oh and on the topic of memory management; its true that XP has quite a good protected memory system. But I don’t believe you have read anything in-depth about how OSX controls memory- which is an imperative system to have for efficient multitasking.
“In Mac OS X, each process has its own sparse 32-bit virtual address space. Thus, each process has an address space that can grow dynamically up to a limit of four gigabytes. As an application uses up space, the virtual memory system allocates additional swap file space on the root file system.”
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/Man…
🙂
For those interested, the German site Macnews.de has some rather nice pics of the Mac mini and its motherboard:
http://www.macnews.de/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=16&page=1
Also, ambiguous opinion can be of no use in some discussions, but at times it has its use
I can say that OSX does indeed “feel” faster when carrying out intense multitasking- and for good reason. The technologies put in place as mentioned above give the user a superb experience when carrying out multiple actions on many applications.
I myself am a multitasking whore- I have at this moment, illustrator, photoshop, indesgn cs, extensis suitcase, 3 finder windows, itunes, bbedit, mail, dreamweaver, flash 2004, address-book, xfactor, and of course firefox open, as I am working on two jobs while liaising with my clients and surfing- and I can emphatically say the system is as responsive now, as if I only had just booted up, and have no apps running.
I can tell, xengren that you have a good knowledge of windows and its respective technologies- which is fantastic, and good to see there are still some people on these forums that actually come here with knowledge to contribute.
While we can discuss the black & white technologies of our platform of choice to no end- I will say that real world facts are of equal consequence as black & white facts. Some would argue more so
Just experience. Mine tells me that XP slows down signifigantly when it has to handle multiple heavy loads, but knowledge tells me that it could just as easily be an inherent problem of the x86 architecture, or maybe it’s just Intel, and AMD has worked around it.
Those machines are broken, severely misconfigured, or grossly underspecified for whatever the task may be. I regularly keep a couple of VMWare machines running on my (rather humble these days) dual 700Mhz P3, 1GB RAM and it rarely chugs (except when heavily swapping, which is hardly the OSes fault).
Now, certainly there are a lot of poorly built, underspecified or just simply broken PCs out there, but a decently built XP machine is more than capable of smoothly multitasking quite heavy loads.
Seeing as OSX is tied to Apple hardware in every sense, I would have thought it to be quite obvious why RISC, Altivec, PPC etc are used to describe Macintosh Multitasking.
No, it isn’t. For starters, OS X is portable, so it’s not “tied to Apple hardware”. Secondly, you aren’t doing anything except throwing out a few technical words you’ve heard that, in context, are meaningless because they all have equivalents on PCs.
Oh and on the topic of memory management; its true that XP has quite a good protected memory system. But I don’t believe you have read anything in-depth about how OSX controls memory- which is an imperative system to have for efficient multitasking.
“In Mac OS X, each process has its own sparse 32-bit virtual address space. Thus, each process has an address space that can grow dynamically up to a limit of four gigabytes. As an application uses up space, the virtual memory system allocates additional swap file space on the root file system.”
RIght, so it does it just like every other OS does it.
I can say that OSX does indeed “feel” faster when carrying out intense multitasking- and for good reason. The technologies put in place as mentioned above give the user a superb experience when carrying out multiple actions on many applications.
Those “technologies” aren’t anything that hasn’t been present on the PC side since before OS X was even released, so stop trying to pretend they’re something unique or special.
I myself am a multitasking whore- I have at this moment, illustrator, photoshop, indesgn cs, extensis suitcase, 3 finder windows, itunes, bbedit, mail, dreamweaver, flash 2004, address-book, xfactor, and of course firefox open, as I am working on two jobs while liaising with my clients and surfing- and I can emphatically say the system is as responsive now, as if I only had just booted up, and have no apps running.
Must be a pretty beefy Mac.
Mac mini main board
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2005/0114/mw5_157.jpg
“Those machines are broken, severely misconfigured, or grossly underspecified for whatever the task may be. I regularly keep a couple of VMWare machines running on my (rather humble these days) dual 700Mhz P3, 1GB RAM and it rarely chugs (except when heavily swapping, which is hardly the OSes fault).”
It’s not a certain set of computers I was talking about, just the PC’s I’ve worked on in general.
“I myself am a multitasking whore- I have at this moment, illustrator, photoshop, indesgn cs, extensis suitcase, 3 finder windows, itunes, bbedit, mail, dreamweaver, flash 2004, address-book, xfactor, and of course firefox open, as I am working on two jobs while liaising with my clients and surfing- and I can emphatically say the system is as responsive now, as if I only had just booted up, and have no apps running.
Must be a pretty beefy Mac.”
I often do things like that on my TiBook, which is less that what’s offered with the Mac mini. It’s been my portable video editor, recording studio, and main web development machine for a long time now.
It’s not a certain set of computers I was talking about, just the PC’s I’ve worked on in general.
The point remains, if the machines are chugging, they’re chugging for a reason, and that reason is not “because they’re Windows PCs”.
Windows machines are quite capable of smoothly multitasking heavy loads. If they _aren’t_, then that can be remedied.
I often do things like that on my TiBook, which is less that what’s offered with the Mac mini. It’s been my portable video editor, recording studio, and main web development machine for a long time now.
As I’ve said elsewhere, it has to be a matter of perception. I’ve yet to sit in front of any Mac short of a dual G5 and not feel like the UI is lagged. OTOH, I rarely find that on my ~5 year old workstation. IOW, when I find a PC laggy I can generally identify and fix the problem (not enough RAM, broken HW, etc), but when I find a Mac laggy there’s basically nothing that can be done because I find even quite generously specified Macs feel slow.
Tell you what want multitaking test get 4 or 5 different video players running different video on a high end PC and a HIGH end mac, tell me that you get when switching between video.
I got ten 640×480 Divx files playing perfectly at once (over the network, no less) on my 2.8Ghz P4 (not even hyperthreaded) before I lost interest.
I would not even attempt that with my athlon 2400 system
Should handle it with ease – unless there’s problems elsewhere of course (eg: not enough RAM, crappy PCI video card).
wow, thats a very clean mainboard with very few high profile components. airflow must be brilliant! So thats why they can keep the fan quietly blowing at low speeds
“The point remains, if the machines are chugging, they’re chugging for a reason, and that reason is not “because they’re Windows PCs”.
Windows machines are quite capable of smoothly multitasking heavy loads. If they _aren’t_, then that can be remedied.”
They’re chugging because everything has it’s limit. They don’t give me a problem in day to day use (not counting the usual virus/malware problems), just when I push them to test things like this.
“As I’ve said elsewhere, it has to be a matter of perception. I’ve yet to sit in front of any Mac short of a dual G5 and not feel like the UI is lagged. OTOH, I rarely find that on my ~5 year old workstation. IOW, when I find a PC laggy I can generally identify and fix the problem (not enough RAM, broken HW, etc), but when I find a Mac laggy there’s basically nothing that can be done because I find even quite generously specified Macs feel slow.”
You know, I’ve talked to quite a few people who have sat and used my TiBook that said the same thing and narrowed the problem they had down to the mouse. Once I sped it up their perception changed dramatically. Try that. I mention it specifically because the mouse settings on the G5 at work were set faster by default.
“wow, thats a very clean mainboard with very few high profile components. airflow must be brilliant! So thats why they can keep the fan quietly blowing at low speeds”
Smaller than a laptop board too.
Yes, I agree, if you go into System Preferences – Keyboard & Mouse and adjust to your taste, I max out keyboard speed, then OSX feels extremely responsive.
I think Apple tunes it’s setting for GrandMother.
My sister has a brand new Dell P4 3.0 1 gig of memory and the G4 1.5 Powerbook is generally faster. I do have the advantage of not needing a huge AV engine always running in the background sucking 40%? of cpu cycles just to keep the OS up.
“I think Apple tunes it’s setting for GrandMother.”
Far as I can tell, it’s a setting left over from when their main market was printing. Image apps need a slow mouse for more accurate drawing. It’s also interesting to read up on the differences in how XP and OS X handle the mouse.
Another blanket exageration. And why and how is it so superior? (Technical reasons, not empirical data about how you and all your friends “feel” it’s so much faster.) You’re not doing the Mac any good by making outrageous claims that have no merit.
http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2232
I would read that article on Anand’s evaluation of a Mac. Read in particular the topics, Multitasking, Perfect Multitasking and stability.
Anand I would say is a neutral source if not a self proclaimed PC (x86) enthusiast. His article gives you the user perspective but not too much technical detail about the schedular but the GUI technicalities of MacOS X supperior multitasking capabilities are well enumerated.
As I’ve said elsewhere, it has to be a matter of perception. I’ve yet to sit in front of any Mac short of a dual G5 and not feel like the UI is lagged. OTOH, I rarely find that on my ~5 year old workstation. IOW, when I find a PC laggy I can generally identify and fix the problem (not enough RAM, broken HW, etc), but when I find a Mac laggy there’s basically nothing that can be done because I find even quite generously specified Macs feel slow.
As with earlier you fail to metion that you workstation is a Dual PIII with a Gig of Ram. So not quite a fair comparison.
Also this has been discussed before that your are claiming subjective things like your perception of lagginess. You can debate that till death and bever convince me of the validitly of such a dubious claim.
You are comapring your experience with an ibook to a dual cpu workstation. Enough said.
I got ten 640×480 Divx files playing perfectly at once (over the network, no less) on my 2.8Ghz P4 (not even hyperthreaded) before I lost interest.
BS. I have tried something similar on a fully spec’ed out 3.2 Ghz P4 with a 128MB video card couldn’t get more than 3 palying before skipping frames.
I think that for a majority of the users purchasing the Mini the speed will be just fine. I have a G3/500 iBook and it has never prevented me from surfing the web, playig music, using Terminal or any other apps. I go to numerous sites in the DC and VA area using G4 Macs and the complaints aren’t speed but font handling so a lot of these comments on the G4 being slow are just uniniformed and amount to someone reading about Macs and using them intermittantly.
I hear people raving how ITX systems are excellent yet these systems can barely play a DVD, the smallest of these systems are at least twice the size and weight of a Mini and very few to none will be as popular as the Mini. Shuttles, GBoxes and DIY are great but guess what, you can put together a car cheaper than M3 that will be faster than an M3 but it doesn’t make it an M.
The Mini really does not compete with these systems because if you are in the market for a Mini you are looking to run MacOSX and none of these PCs offer that.
As far as the comment someone made that MacOSX is not exclusive to Macs, what else does it run on?
They’re chugging because everything has it’s limit. They don’t give me a problem in day to day use (not counting the usual virus/malware problems), just when I push them to test things like this.
A typical load on my work PC (just looking at my taskbar now) is:
~2 VMWare machines w/256MB allocated each
~3 Firefox windows, usually with a dozen tabs or so each
~10 putty windows
~2 Word 2003 windows
~2 Excel 2003 windows
Outlook 2003
~5 notepad windows
~2 MMC windows
~4 TS clients
~3 MSN messenger windows
This is a dual 700Mhz P3 w/1GB RAM. It’s got two 17″ LCDs being driven by an (ancient) Matrox G400 card. It’s extremely rare for it to be laggy at all and when it is, that lagginess is usually limited to Firefox, which is a good indication it’s leaking memory again and needs a restart. The machine generally only gets rebooted when patches require it has never had a BSOD.
The only Macs I’ve used that come *close* to be able to sustain that sort of workload with my usage patterns are dual G5s with 1GB+ of RAM and, believe me, I’ve used a lot of Macs.
You know, I’ve talked to quite a few people who have sat and used my TiBook that said the same thing and narrowed the problem they had down to the mouse. Once I sped it up their perception changed dramatically. Try that. I mention it specifically because the mouse settings on the G5 at work were set faster by default.
I know about the “slow mouse” thing in MacOS. It’s been like that since, well, the early MacOS Classic days. It’s not that the mouse is slower, per se, it’s that the acceleration curve is substantially different to Windows.
As with earlier you fail to metion that you workstation is a Dual PIII with a Gig of Ram. So not quite a fair comparison.
Except I’m not comparing my workstation to my iBook. I’m comparing it to similarly (and far greater) powered Macs that I’ve used.
Also this has been discussed before that your are claiming subjective things like your perception of lagginess. You can debate that till death and bever convince me of the validitly of such a dubious claim.
Someone asked me my perceptions of using OS X. I gave them. I see no reason not to when similar opinions are given quite regularly here with regards to other OS’s “subjective” features, like “mandatory AV scanners” on Windows systems “chewing up 40% of the CPU”.
You are comapring your experience with an ibook to a dual cpu workstation. Enough said.
False.
BS. I have tried something similar on a fully spec’ed out 3.2 Ghz P4 with a 128MB video card couldn’t get more than 3 palying before skipping frames.
Your machine has problems. Instead of bitching about it and blaming Microsoft, you should try and get it fixed. If my 2.8Ghz P4, with no special tuning attempts made whatsoever (I only use it for gaming, and rarely at that) can do it then your machine should be able to as well, all else being equal.
Anand I would say is a neutral source if not a self proclaimed PC (x86) enthusiast. His article gives you the user perspective but not too much technical detail about the schedular but the GUI technicalities of MacOS X supperior multitasking capabilities are well enumerated.
I’ve read it before. It’s rather hard to make any judgement when you don’t actually know what type of PC he’s using. Note also that he’s using a *2GHz dual G5* with *4GB of RAM*. You’d fucking well hope it was able to multitask smoothly.
You might also have noticed this comment in his article (or you might just have ignored it):
OS X Bottlenecks and Caching
Although the performance of OS X on the dual 2GHz G5 system that I’d been running was definitely acceptable, there is definitely room for improvement. The overall responsiveness of the system was decent, but go back to using a top-of-the-line PC in Windows for a few minutes, and you definitely feel a bit sluggish on the G5. I would say honestly that a 3GHz G5 would be a good speed to have; although, I have yet to try out the new 2.5GHz G5s to see how much things have improved with a 25% increase in clock speed.
Or this bit:
As I mentioned before, the 2GHz G5 processors that were in the system didn’t “feel” slow, but they definitely didn’t feel like the fastest things out there. The system itself could use a little kick in the pants.
He also comments about things like the scrolling speed (which, while artificially limited within the OS, is also one of the first casualties as OS X slows down under load).
I’ll remind you again that this is on a machine with *dual 2GHz G5 processors* and *4GB of RAM*.
Incidentally, when he starts talking about “caching”, it’s not actually the caching implementation that’s causing the behaviour he doesn’t like (disk “crunching”) it’s the different ways the VM systems are tuned. Ironically, he’s actually got it arse-about-face. Windows’ VM system is tuned to keep as much memory free as possible for disk caching, so it tends to be rather agressive about swapping things out, thus “crunching” the disk. OS X, apparently, does not.
Now, I’ve also used Macs like the one Anand has here – and he’s right, they do multitask fairly well. HOwever, given the amount of computing power involved, it would be nothing short of disgraceful if they didn’t. Similarly, like Anand, when I went back to a PC I *still* found it snappier and more responsive to use, even a PC with substantially less computing power than the monster Mac being talked about.
To put it bluntly, Anand’s article doesn’t do a single thing to support an argument of OS X having “superior multitasking”. Indeed, apart from the part at the beginning abuot Windows having problems with lots of windows open, which I’ve never experienced on a well setup system, his opinions and experiences are basically identical to mine.
As far as the comment someone made that MacOSX is not exclusive to Macs, what else does it run on?
At the very least, there’s an x86 port the Apple keeps up to date internally. NeXT/OPENSTEP, which OS X is mostly just the latest revision of, was available on m68k, x86, SPARC and HP PA-RISC.
Certainly, OS X isn’t available *publically* on anything except Macs, but it is a portable OS and to assert that it’s somehow tied to the Macintosh platform is not only false, but also something of an insult to Apple’s development team.
” A typical load on my work PC (just looking at my taskbar now) is:
~2 VMWare machines w/256MB allocated each
~3 Firefox windows, usually with a dozen tabs or so each
~10 putty windows
~2 Word 2003 windows
~2 Excel 2003 windows
Outlook 2003
~5 notepad windows
~2 MMC windows
~4 TS clients
~3 MSN messenger windows”
Not expecting an answer or anything because it’s an irrelevant question, but what exactly are you doing that requires 36 or so web pages open at once (not saying I’ve never been in the same position, just not very often)?
“”It’s got two 17″ LCDs being driven by an (ancient) Matrox G400 card.”
No big issue there, I drive a 23″ high def from my TiBook daily.
“It’s extremely rare for it to be laggy at all and when it is, that lagginess is usually limited to Firefox, which is a good indication it’s leaking memory again and needs a restart.”
One of the few things that keeps me from using FireFox more often (the other being it’s poor key controls, I like to control things via key commands more often when I’m on a laptop).
“The machine generally only gets rebooted when patches require it has never had a BSOD.”
I’ve only had XP crash on me once or twice in the past months, so I wouldn’t doubt that a bit.
“The only Macs I’ve used that come *close* to be able to sustain that sort of workload with my usage patterns are dual G5s with 1GB+ of RAM and, believe me, I’ve used a lot of Macs.”
Strange, I handle that stuff daily on my TiBook, between Dreamweaver, Flash, Omniweb, Explorer, Firefox (multiple browsers open a lot for testing), iTunes, a few IM windows in iChat, and Logic. Almost all audio work is handled in real time, and most SD video is handled in real time.
“I know about the “slow mouse” thing in MacOS. It’s been like that since, well, the early MacOS Classic days. It’s not that the mouse is slower, per se, it’s that the acceleration curve is substantially different to Windows.”
Just thought I’d mention it, most people seem to get hung up over it.
“Your machine has problems. Instead of bitching about it and blaming Microsoft, you should try and get it fixed. If my 2.8Ghz P4, with no special tuning attempts made whatsoever (I only use it for gaming, and rarely at that) can do it then your machine should be able to as well, all else being equal.”
I get the same issue he’s got. It plays all the videos, but they start skipping frames, especially when moving windows around or minimizing things.
“I’ve read it before. It’s rather hard to make any judgement when you don’t actually know what type of PC he’s using. Note also that he’s using a *2GHz dual G5* with *4GB of RAM*. You’d fucking well hope it was able to multitask smoothly.”
Actually, look again, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s only got 512 MB RAM and he’s got a fairly old video card driving multiple Apple cinema displays (we’re talking high definition displays). I’d bet anything that’s what’s causing the slowdown. OS X and the G5s are probably not coming anywhere close to what they can do because of those bottlenecks.
“At the very least, there’s an x86 port the Apple keeps up to date internally. NeXT/OPENSTEP, which OS X is mostly just the latest revision of, was available on m68k, x86, SPARC and HP PA-RISC.”
Obviously they probably aren’t still keeping up anything but PPC and x86 (probably x86-64) at this point. But yeah.
“Certainly, OS X isn’t available *publically* on anything except Macs, but it is a portable OS and to assert that it’s somehow tied to the Macintosh platform is not only false, but also something of an insult to Apple’s development team.”
I would go so far as to say they have it tuned for PPC much more than x86, but I’m sure they have it mostly working on x86.
‘At the very least, there’s an x86 port the Apple keeps up to date internally. NeXT/OPENSTEP, which OS X is mostly just the latest revision of, was available on m68k, x86, SPARC and HP PA-RISC.
Certainly, OS X isn’t available *publically* on anything except Macs, but it is a portable OS and to assert that it’s somehow tied to the Macintosh platform is not only false, but also something of an insult to Apple’s development team.’
There is an up to date port of Darwin to X86, none of MacOSX on X86 that I am aware of.
Someone asked me my perceptions of using OS X. I gave them. I see no reason not to when similar opinions are given quite regularly here with regards to other OS’s “subjective” features, like “mandatory AV scanners” on Windows systems “chewing up 40% of the CPU”.
I think the figure is 20%. And that bit is not subjective by an stretch of the imagination. Microsoft requires you to run an Antivirus Program. Thier SP2 security wizard pops a warning is one isn’t detected.
Your machine has problems. Instead of bitching about it and blaming Microsoft, you should try and get it fixed. If my 2.8Ghz P4, with no special tuning attempts made whatsoever (I only use it for gaming, and rarely at that) can do it then your machine should be able to as well, all else being equal.
Yes, according to you all windows PCs are misconfigured. I have always tuned my Windows boxes manually to eek every bit of performance out of them, including disabling NTExecutive Paging, turning on caching as alluded by you in response to AR. Infact turning on caching worsens the interactive performance of XP. I even diable every unwanted service like the messaging service and Remote Desktop….. To name a few.
Please spare me the drivel of how if a windows box isn’t performaning it is a configuration issue and how OS X sucks by default.
Not expecting an answer or anything because it’s an irrelevant question, but what exactly are you doing that requires 36 or so web pages open at once (not saying I’ve never been in the same position, just not very often)?
Requires ? Probably not a great deal. However, I keep them open because there’s no reason to close them. There’s usually quite a few for Slashdot, OSNews, fark, kuro5hin, net banking, etc. Then there’s all the pages that opened from various bits of research in system problems, optimising/automating tasks, new technologies, configuring new machines, etc (I’m a sysadmin).
No big issue there, I drive a 23″ high def from my TiBook daily.
I daresay the ATI card in your TiBook has substantially more grunt than my poor old 16MB G400
. I actually wanted to replace it with one of the newer Matrox dual DVI cards, but unfortunately the motherboard in my workstation doesn’t support a new enough version of AGP so it won’t fit 
.
Strange, I handle that stuff daily on my TiBook, between Dreamweaver, Flash, Omniweb, Explorer, Firefox (multiple browsers open a lot for testing), iTunes, a few IM windows in iChat, and Logic. Almost all audio work is handled in real time, and most SD video is handled in real time.
Again, I’ve concluded it’s a matter of perception and usage patterns. I’ve sat down in front of people’s Macs and used them, commented on how “chunky” I find it and have them wonder what the heck I’m talking about. Even when I demonstrate the things I find slow (scrolling, menus, task switching, etc) they simply don’t perceive a problem.
Also, as I’ve said, I’ve used quite a lot of different Macs over the years and I’ve found these problems consistently with OS X. Certainly, it’s improved over the time (the Public Beta and 10.0 were truly atrocious), but it’s still noticable.
Remember, I’m not saying the performance of individual apps suffers (eg: encoding in iTunes in the background), just that the interactive elements of the UI feel “laggy”. If you discount the UI, OS X appears to multitask (as in run several tasks simultaneously) quite respectably (eg: the playing lots of videos trick).
I get the same issue he’s got. It plays all the videos, but they start skipping frames, especially when moving windows around or minimizing things.
*shrug*. Can’t say. It works fine for me and I’ve certainly not tried to do anything special to my system. I didn’t even spend a great deal of time when I bought the parts, except from making sure the motherboard had dual-channel RAM.
Actually, look again, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s only got 512 MB RAM and he’s got a fairly old video card driving multiple Apple cinema displays (we’re talking high definition displays). I’d bet anything that’s what’s causing the slowdown. OS X and the G5s are probably not coming anywhere close to what they can do because of those bottlenecks.
Read the article more carefully. It shipped with 512MB of RAM, but he upgraded to 2GB (and then later 4GB).
“The obvious requirement for any OS that caches heavily is a lot of memory; while my system shipped with 512MB of memory, I quickly found the need to upgrade to more. At first, it was 2GB, then 4GB and I even contemplated going up to the 8GB limit; although, with 4GB, I definitely have memory to spare.”
Remember also that the video card with that machine is the one that shipped as standard. It’s still the same vard (or, rather, chipset) that drives the current TiBooks and substantially faster than the ones in the iBook and Mini Mac (not sure how it compares to the iMac G5, I’m not a video card guru).
Added to that, the video card “bottleneck” generally only affects GPU specific effects – things like Expose – and it really does take quite a load to start being noticable.
To put it succintly, his Mac was an *extremely* powerful piece of computing hardware. Any sort of unresponsiveness, except under _extreme_ load, is IMHO unacceptable.
I’m really not sure what it is that makes OS X slow. It smacks to me of a software/programming issue, because throwing more hardware at the problem doesn’t seem to fix it. Compared to, say, a dual G4/500, a dual 2Ghz G5 should be blisteringly snappy (with somewhere around 8x as much raw power), but it’s not. Certainly, individual tasks complete much, much quicker, but the whole package doesn’t “feel” anything close to that much quicker.
I actually remember saying to a friend of mine, back when I bought a new PBG4/667 (just after 10.2 was released) that my PB felt chunky, but I’d estimate a 2-3x increase in raw power would produce enough of an improvement in the GUI to make it “fast enough” (based on prior experience with Windows, Linux, MacOS Classic, OS/2, etc). But that level of system came and went quite some time ago, and I *still* find OS X always feels like it’s half a step behind me. Which is a damn shame, because most other aspects of the OS _rock_.
There is an up to date port of Darwin to X86, none of MacOSX on X86 that I am aware of.
I was talking of internal builds that Apple would be creating to make sure no platform dependencies creep in. See if you can befriend some developers that work – or have worked – on major software projects that need to preserve platform independence. Usually there’s an almost completely functional cross-platform build kept in sync with the main product.
You can pretty much guarantee, for example, Microsoft have mostly functional internal builds of Windows NT (XP/2003) for PowerPC. Apple will be doing the same for OS X. They’ve probably got x86 and x86-64 builds (including Quartz, Aqua, etc) at the very least. It’s just bad practices *not* to do it.
I think the figure is 20%. And that bit is not subjective by an stretch of the imagination. Microsoft requires you to run an Antivirus Program. Thier SP2 security wizard pops a warning is one isn’t detected.
Rubbish. I’ve never used a full time virus scanner on any of my personal systems and the SP2 nag screen is easy to get rid of. Even on a terminal server with ~35 active users (dual 2.6Ghz Xeons), the CPU overhead of Symantec AV isn’t really measurable.
Just to test it somewhere else, I dropped onto one of our user machines (2Ghz P4, 256Mb RAM) and copied the Windows XP CD onto the local drive from a network share, which is about as much of a torture test as you’re going to get for realtime virus scanning. *Overall* CPU usage didn’t even get over 10%, despite it having a few IE windows, Word and Outlook also running in the background.
So, quite frankly, off the cuff remarks about “compulsory AV software chewing up 40% of the CPU” are a load of crap.
Yes, according to you all windows PCs are misconfigured.
No, only the ones that are not acting as expected.
I have always tuned my Windows boxes manually to eek every bit of performance out of them, including disabling NTExecutive Paging, turning on caching as alluded by you in response to AR. Infact turning on caching worsens the interactive performance of XP. I even diable every unwanted service like the messaging service and Remote Desktop….. To name a few.
Well then, perhaps you’re doing more harm than good. That’s what happens to most people who try to “tweak” their systems.
Please spare me the drivel of how if a windows box isn’t performaning it is a configuration issue […]
99% of the time, it is a configuration issue.
If people can go on with “drivel” one-liners about how their 500Mhz iMac outperforms their sister’s husband’s cousin’s ex-wife’s daughter-in-law’s 3Ghz P4 based on the 5 minutes they used it at the family christmas party, I think I’m more than entitled to a few posts explaining what I find slow, what my experience is and what I think causes it.
[…] and how OS X sucks by default.
It doesn’t suck, it’s just slow.
The overall responsiveness of the system was decent, but go back to using a top-of-the-line PC in Windows for a few minutes, and you definitely feel a bit sluggish on the G5.
You might also have noticed this comment in his article (or you might just have ignored it):
No I didn’t. He says he hasn’t tested the fastest Power Mac On the market. The top of the line PC that Anand has access to is quite bleeding edge.
I think Anand’s opinion is fair. I believe Anand has the latest PC hardware for evaluation from AMD, Intel, ATI, Nvidia etc. berfore the rest of us. So I am sure he has some serious hardware to play with.
Let’s recap, Anand has bleeding edge hardware so top-of-the line for him is pretty powerful. He says he hasn’t tested the latest 2.5Ghz G5. What is your point.
NOTE:- that you claim a less powerfull PC running windows is Snappier. Anand say’s top of the line. Top of the line PCs are always ahead of Mac in the latest hardware like graphics cards and memory technologies.
Incidentally, when he starts talking about “caching”, it’s not actually the caching implementation that’s causing the behaviour he doesn’t like (disk “crunching”) it’s the different ways the VM systems are tuned. Ironically, he’s actually got it arse-about-face. Windows’ VM system is tuned to keep as much memory free as possible for disk caching, so it tends to be rather agressive about swapping things out, thus “crunching” the disk. OS X, apparently, does not.
Really, Go ahead and set these properties on the XP box and bring it closer to OS X’s settings
DisableExecutivePaging – this keeps all of the executive pages in memory and
doesn’t page them to disk.
LargeSystemCache – This has he effect of using all free memory for the Filesystem cache.
While these do improve the disk crunching nastiness of XP they do lower interactive perfromance. But I’d rather have a slower UI than have an App freeze waiting for it’s working set to be paged from disk.
I find the Pauses and disk grinding particularly annonying. I much prefer the OS X and unix philosophy of VM tuning than XP’s. You obviously prefer the later.
To put it bluntly, Anand’s article doesn’t do a single thing to support an argument of OS X having “superior multitasking”. Indeed, apart from the part at the beginning abuot Windows having problems with lots of windows open, which I’ve never experienced on a well setup system, his opinions and experiences are basically identical to mine.
To put it bluntly, I think you are full of it. Everbody has a problem with windows multitaking, even a person who professionally tests and runs a pro wintel website. But you want me to believe that if you don’t have a problem there isn’t one. Please.
I am not saying that OS X is perfect. But windows doesn’t do half the work OS X does graphicaly. Note the reason Microsoft wants Avalon out they know thier GUI experience is outdate compared to OS X.
With tiger I think Apple might be using CoreImage and Core video to offload more of the GUI rendering to the GPU. The problem with OS X is that most of the rendering is still CPU bound. I hope Apple fixes that in Tiger.
Avalon which is comparable to the OS X experience is rendering on the GPU but it is still years away. OS X was released to work with hardware available in 2001 and is being changed has hardware progresses. Just different philosophies IMO.
Release a great 3D user experience without hardware required to maek it perform optimally. Or wait till hardware is available. Apple chose one and I think it has paid of huge dividends. OS X has done more to help Apple’s sales numbers than hurt it. I for one and my colleagues wouldn’t have purchased Macs if it weren’t for OS X.
A little performance is acceptable for a rich user experience ahead of it’s time. Apple is constantly improving things so there is not complaints. But it is not unacceptable as you would have everyone believe. That is my issue with you and your posts.
Well then, perhaps you’re doing more harm than good. That’s what happens to most people who try to “tweak” their systems.
As I have mentioned tweaking the VM system gets one away from the horrid paging of XPs default settings. Which I and most people find annoying.
I have about had it with your superiority complex. There are just as many independant people that prescribe to raptor’s, PantherPPC’s, Anands and my opinions of XP and it’s multitasking capabilites.
But you are constanly trying to tell us we have no idea what we are doing, and you are an expert in computer sciences. Yet when you are pressed with techncal details you fold like a house of cards.
I think I’m more than entitled to a few posts explaining what I find slow, what my experience is and what I think causes it.
This is a Mac thread and as with every mac thread you bring the same “drivel” with you.
Forutnately Apple is selling a million units a quarter with no problems. Obviously 4 million people don’t have a problem with OS Xs perfromance. Nor do the students and researchers at VAtech. Or the makers of the tv show “scrubs”, becuase they do use Macs and final cut pro to edit the show,
So It is you and your opinion and as with opinions go you are enitled to experess them but express them as opinions and don’t pass them off as fact on every Mac thread.
Post a video of your 10 video DIVX experiment please, I would low to see the low latency windows box in action.
Alright. I’m sick of going point by point here. After reading over this whole thing again, here’s what it’s boiling down to…
We started talking about multitasking and are way off topic. Actually it started with the Mac mini, but whatever.
drsmithy, you seem to be tuning XP machines to your liking, and not tuning OS X. It sounds like you don’t have a problem with it’s multitasking, but it’s graphical effects, which XP doesn’t have. Why don’t you try turning them off, ie- tuning OS X to your liking.
I have a problem with XPs multitasking. I’m not talking about the GUI slowing down under heavy load, I’m talking about when I send something to it for rendering, every other process starts to drag, whereas it doesn’t on OS X
“Post a video of your 10 video DIVX experiment please, I would low to see the low latency windows box in action.”
I’d like to see it too.
No I didn’t. He says he hasn’t tested the fastest Power Mac On the market. The top of the line PC that Anand has access to is quite bleeding edge.
I do hope you grasp how ludicrous it is that you apparently need “the fastest Power Mac on the market” to get a snappy UI ?
Not to mention it wasn’t that long ago the dual 2Ghz *was* “the fastest Power Mac on the market”. Back when this article was actually published, IIRC.
Let’s recap, Anand has bleeding edge hardware so top-of-the line for him is pretty powerful. He says he hasn’t tested the latest 2.5Ghz G5. What is your point.
That he says basically exactly the same things about OS X that I do. Feel free to continue cherry-picking his opinions, though.
If a brutally fast Mac like a dual 2GHz G5 with multiple gigs of RAM _still_ isn’t a snappy as a Windows box, there’s a problem.
I find the Pauses and disk grinding particularly annonying. I much prefer the OS X and unix philosophy of VM tuning than XP’s. You obviously prefer the later.
Indeed. Why would I want to make the common case slower just so the uncommon case was a bit faster ?
You’ll also have to excuse me if I take performance tuning suggestions from someone who thinks “all apps are cpu bound” with a grain of salt.
To put it bluntly, I think you are full of it. Everbody has a problem with windows multitaking, even a person who professionally tests and runs a pro wintel website.
So “everybody” == a few people on OSNews and Anand lal Shimpi?
But you want me to believe that if you don’t have a problem there isn’t one. Please.
It’s not just me. Millions of people quite happily use their Windows machines every day.
I am not saying that OS X is perfect. But windows doesn’t do half the work OS X does graphicaly. Note the reason Microsoft wants Avalon out they know thier GUI experience is outdate compared to OS X.
I’m well aware of that. This doesn’t change the fact that the user experience, from a responsiveness point of view, is worse. If their hardware or software can’t handle it, then they shouldn’t be doing it. At least Microsoft are going to have the option to turn down the detail and get the old UI back.
But, as I’ve said elsewhere, the problem isn’t with the fancy graphical effects, the problem is with the mundane stuff.
But it is not unacceptable as you would have everyone believe.
I state my opinion and encourage others to go and find out for themselves.
As I have mentioned tweaking the VM system gets one away from the horrid paging of XPs default settings. Which I and most people find annoying.
I do have to wonder why your “most people” should carry more authority than your “most people”, as you imply. Just one post ago you were berating me for “having everyone believe” that my opinion is the only valid one.
I have about had it with your superiority complex.
I can’t say it’s any different to yours, or a whole bunch of other peoples’.
There are just as many independant people that prescribe to raptor’s, PantherPPC’s, Anands and my opinions of XP and it’s multitasking capabilites.
And there’s lots that agree with me, as well.
But you are constanly trying to tell us we have no idea what we are doing, and you are an expert in computer sciences.
No, I just tell you that behaviour X is not normal.
Yet when you are pressed with techncal details you fold like a house of cards.
I don’t recall being “pressed” for any technical details in this thread.
This is a Mac thread and as with every mac thread you bring the same “drivel” with you.
Just like “everyone else”. But presumably since you agree with them, it’s ok for them to post it.
Forutnately Apple is selling a million units a quarter with no problems. Obviously 4 million people don’t have a problem with OS Xs perfromance. Nor do the students and researchers at VAtech. Or the makers of the tv show “scrubs”, becuase they do use Macs and final cut pro to edit the show,
Therefore, the millions of people that quite happily use Windows would suggest they don’t have problems with the way Windows works, correct ? Where does “everybody” fit into that worldview, again ?
So It is you and your opinion and as with opinions go you are enitled to experess them but express them as opinions and don’t pass them off as fact on every Mac thread.
I would have thought the “opinion” part was obvious, given it’s being posted onto a user forum.
Not to mention I’m no different to everyone else here who “passes opinions off as facts”.
Apparently, your stance is that since I don’t agree with the pro-Mac, anti-Windows stance of you and a few other people in this thread, I should keep my opinions to myself.
drsmithy, you seem to be tuning XP machines to your liking, and not tuning OS X.
That’s one of the more important points – I *don’t* “tune” my XP boxes. I just use them (although I do set the theme back to “Windows Classic”.
It sounds like you don’t have a problem with it’s multitasking, but it’s graphical effects, which XP doesn’t have. Why don’t you try turning them off, ie- tuning OS X to your liking.
It’s not the graphical effects at all, because most of them time *they aren’t slow*. It’s the incidental things – menus, scrolling, copying & pasting text.
The graphical effects are *fine*. As I’ve stated numerous times before, both in this thread and elsewhere, they rarely slow down except under very heavy load.
I have a problem with XPs multitasking. I’m not talking about the GUI slowing down under heavy load, I’m talking about when I send something to it for rendering, every other process starts to drag, whereas it doesn’t on OS X
All I can say is I don’t see it. Maybe you’re swapping ?
Post a video of your 10 video DIVX experiment please, I would low to see the low latency windows box in action.
I’d like to see it too.
Well, the only thing I’ve got to capture it with is a digicam that can take 30 second chunks @ 15fps, so I doubt that would give a very good representation.
I will concede, however, that if I have those videos playing and start randomly dragging other windows around and, in particular, resizing them, then there’s some skipping in the background. However, I wasn’t aware that was something I was supposed to be checking.
You are full of BS, FUD, etc. Did you star in the movie Jacka$$ or something? You should have, you know? :rolleyes:
:whistle:
:peace:
I think apple did it right this time.
It’s of no use thinking that you can have all for cheap, market logic does not permit it.
The common users do only Internet, e-mail, get rid of their digital photos and music and occasionally put together videos.
And you do not need all that power. I have a PC 2.6 ghz HT/800 and when I have compared with the Toshiba M2 (centrino 1.6ghz) I have found out that I can have multimedia content from the internet or play DVD w/o any difference. It has a 5400 rpm Hard disk, well it boots Win2k faster than my bigger machine. So what? Ghz mean nothing in the Intel World so why we should care about it in the Mac World?
If you want to do the basic things a Computer should do for you, Mac Mini is more than enough.
– Saludos
– Pasha
I wonder if you really think that a Mini Mac can perform resonably with MacOSX with only 256 MB of Ram.
I wonder if an ATI 9200chip equipped with only 64 MBs of Memory has been a wise choice.
I am considering to buy the mac mini and I am sure I will at the end .. but hey … why Apple is still selling all the units with 256 of basic configuration?
Why the top end configuration able to support 8GB are with 512 only?
In ITaly the a mac mini upgraded to 1 GB BTO is 430 euros more. Isn’t it standard memory? if so .. why so much money? (considering they clearly say It should be upgraded by apple or a reseller?).
Do you think the folks wandering into the Apple stores to look around at the mini mac give a flat damn about performance specs?
Or even a bunch of geeks fighting on a OS news site over the responsiveness while running various programs?
Lets see how cool it is. This is what the consumer is thinking whether they want to admit it or not.
Lets see if there are any obvious gotchas or missing pieces. That is the logical side stepping in.
You can buy Office for the thing right?
It run IE so the average user can click Internet Exploder right?
And it looks so neat.
That is what so many hardcore geeks cannot understand or conceive of. The borderline Asperger’s mindset of the geek bits cannot get the idea that people would buy a computer as long as there are not obvious gotchas based on cool factor.
I remember when the PowerMacs first came out and they had a REAL advantage in speed over the Pentiums and the macs all looked about like a biege PC and you could not give a damn Mac away except to the faithfull.
Hell, Apple lost most of its marketshare when it had a CLEAR tech advantage over the PC hardware.
Then suddenly they have a hit and start selling computers pretty well. Why? Did they get some new advantage?
No.
They make cute looking multicolored Macs that look like freakin’ gum drops.
Its amazing how utterly clueless people are to the fact that the Powerbooks when it came out did not continue to sell just on innovation but on cool factor.
Its amazing people do not understand how over-priced and under-whelming iPods swept up an already established small scale mp3 player market and expanded it wildly. Why? The iPod just looks damn cool.
“So “everybody” == a few people on OSNews and Anand lal Shimpi?”
Actually, most people in media production won’t use XP because of it.
“That’s one of the more important points – I *don’t* “tune” my XP boxes. I just use them (although I do set the theme back to “Windows Classic”.”
You said you did earlier. I don’t mean hardware tuning btw, I mean software settings.
“It’s not the graphical effects at all, because most of them time *they aren’t slow*. It’s the incidental things – menus, scrolling, copying & pasting text.
The graphical effects are *fine*. As I’ve stated numerous times before, both in this thread and elsewhere, they rarely slow down except under very heavy load.”
Not sure how copying and pasting could be slow, but menu’s and scrolling are graphical effects in OS X. The menus fade in and out, and the scroll bars have an aqua effect (from theme templates, from what I can tell, they have 16 different images that make up a scroll bar).
“Well, the only thing I’ve got to capture it with is a digicam that can take 30 second chunks @ 15fps, so I doubt that would give a very good representation.”
Well understood.
“I will concede, however, that if I have those videos playing and start randomly dragging other windows around and, in particular, resizing them, then there’s some skipping in the background. However, I wasn’t aware that was something I was supposed to be checking.”
Yeah, that’s what we were referring to. It’s one of the things Apple shows off a lot. They play a bunch of videos, resize some, minimize some to the dock, move them around.
ckristian, 256 is a bit low. The computer itself will handle most things fine, I’ve worked on Macs with lower specs that handle OS X without a hitch. If you want more RAM though, places like MacMall usually double it for free.
Jognathan Bailes, you’re right. This debate doesn’t matter and won’t change anything, but it’s still fun. And I’m with you on the cool factor, but I like to quote MDN about the Mac mini…
“To really understand the Mac mini, think of it as an amazing $499 software bundle and OS package which is unrivaled in personal computing history that includes a free Apple Macintosh computer.”
The iPod though, as much as it is being sold on coolness, it does have clear advantages over the competitors.
You’ll also have to excuse me if I take performance tuning suggestions from someone who thinks “all apps are cpu bound” with a grain of salt.
Ok after reading all your nonsense, I am going to ignore most of it to show your technical ignorance.
Plesae tell me how all apps are not cpu bound. How do you schedule an App?
All apps are composed of instructions and CPUs execute instructions, so all apps are cpu bound, understood.
A load or a store to a address that is mapped to a device is what makes access to and I/O device possible. So an app has to execute some insturctions to make I/O possible. Be it doing a PIO access to a device or making a call to the device driver to make DMA happen to a buffer.
The scheduler schedules threads or processes which make up Apps you run. So all apps are cpu bound. Cpus run Apps.
Yeah please continue to live in the illusion that you know everything about computers. And I will continue to ignore anything you have to say. There is no reasoning with a person who thinks he knows everything. Caio.
Here is Anand’s take on the Mac Mini. Thought he compalins about the low default shipping memory. He does mention the iMac G5 and how memory was the problem, no where does he mention lagginess in OS X.
http://anandtech.com/weblog/default.aspx?bid=161
Mac World San Fran – Tuesday, Jan 11, 2005 3:25 PM
Because of the close proximity to CES, I couldn’t make it down to Mac World, which is a bit of a shame considering all of the interesting suff that was announced there. Now that some of the announcements have been made I thought I’d chime in on things:
Mac mini
The Mac mini is interesting, especially given how small it is. It’s basically Apple’s answer to the Shuttle XPC, except a lot smaller. The thing weighs 2.9 lbs and measures 6.5″ on all sides (and is only 2″ high), it’s basically a laptop without the integrated display and reproportioned to maximize desktop space. The specs are quite similar to Apple’s PowerBook line – offering either a 1.25GHz G4 or a 1.42GHz G4 as a CPU option. The CPU options are strong enough to be competitive with the Celerons that Dell offers in their equivalently priced systems, but definitely not strong enough to compete with something like a 2.8 – 3.0GHz Pentium 4. Honestly I think the CPU is powerful enough, but where Apple really dropped the ball is on the amount of memory. After extensively using the iMac G5 I found that even on the 1.8GHz 20″ model the system is basically bound by memory size more than CPU performance (it only ships with 256MB). The move from 256MB to 512MB in OS X 10.3.7 results in a tremendous reduction in disk swapping, which is very important to the overall user experience and one area where the cheap PCs generally fall behind in.
The price points are higher than I would’ve liked to have seen them, but honestly $499 and $599 are still competitive. My main complaint here continues to be the memory size. I’d like to see at least the $599 model have 512MB of memory, although I wouldn’t want to give up the faster processor for it. Unfortunately for $499 I don’t think it will be cheap enough for PC users to pick up as a secondary system; an OS X experiment box if you will. I’d say the limit for that crowd would be $399, although then you could be compromising performance specs which would be detrimental to the idea of giving people a positive OS X experience.
I’m impressed by the integrated DVI output as well as the overall design of the system, which I think give it the edge over competing ultracheap PCs. The Radeon 9200 GPU isn’t anything to get excited about, so it won’t be a gaming machine, but then again Macs really aren’t these days to begin with.
My only other complaint from a personal standpoint are the sizes of the HDDs, I’d like to see a massive HDD size option as this thing would make for a great personal server. It sounds like the Mac mini is using a standard 3.5″ IDE HDD, if so, replacing that drive with a larger one shouldn’t be a problem…
Overall, I think the Mac mini is a positive move for Apple and it looks to be a decent product. I was definitely skeptical of the “cheap Mac” at first, but I can say I’m quite impressed at this stage.
I just did this experiment.
I have about 10 tabs open in safari this Osnews thread with “view all posts in a single page option”. I played a divx video using mplayer. I have a terminal with top session running, I launched a quicktime movie.
While the two movies were playing I started to scroll the page with the space bar continually pressed on this osnews thread with 288 posts and the animated adverts.
Not only was the scrolling smooth, both videos didn’t skip or slow down and there was no beach ball.
I that is not a torture for the graphics system of OS X I don’t no what else a normal person would run that will cause it to slow down.
All this mind you while the powerbook was running on batteries meaning the performance was not set to highest.
I can’t fathom what your compalints are either where as you cliamed you did experience frames skipping but weren’t looking for it. So I am questioning your interpretation of lagginess. Obviously it is different from mine.
To each his own. Since the Mac mini is spec’ed similar to my 1.25Ghz powerbook I would say it is more than adequate for most people. end of discussion
I did the above experiment now with 4 mpeg videos in quicktime one Divx movie in Mplayer.
The scrolling slowed down a little but no beach ball. I bumped the energy saver to highest and the performance improved, albeit not as fast as with only two videos. Then I bumped the setting down to longest battery life.
The scrolling slowed to crawl but still no beach ball, or choppiness in scrolling. And none of the videos ever skipped.
The Mac Mini should be more than adequate.
I can’t fathom what your compalints are either where as you cliamed you did experience frames skipping but weren’t looking for it.
should be:
I can’t fathom what your compalints are either; where as you cliamed you did experience frames skipping but weren’t looking for it on your windows experiment.
I did delete the favicons cache in safari which is know to lead to slow downs. ~/Library/Safai/Icons delelte every thing in that directory and Safari get’s a lot faster.
Also you can enable windows buffere compression to compress unused window buffers by the window manager. It looks like you have too many windows open and a 1000 post slashdot thread just causes your brower window buffer to get huge. Scrolling through it might be causing too many pages to be evicted from you graphics card becuase of all the other windows taking up space.
I have a 64MB card your iBook I think might have only a 32MB one or maybe even 16MB. The Mac Mini with 32MB should be adequate for the market it is aimed at.
OS X, like avalon likes a lot of video memory.
Yeah the Mini’s speed will be just fine. Anand has access to the fastest PC hardware imaginable and he digs it so its all good.
Mr. Smith, almost 300 comments here and over 500 comments in the other Mini article and less than 10 people agree with you! These Mini’s are going to be hot sellers. Next year when Apple comes out with a G5 Mini it will be the same old whing from ya.
Its too small, its too fast, its too cool, not enough heat, no dual processors no RaADEON X1000. Too integrated no fibre channel card no internal RAID, RAID 1 sux, blah blah blah. In every Mac thread you have always been hateful.
And as you hate you continue to be consumed by the dark side and soon you will be mine young Jedi.
Be happy Mr Smith. The Mac mini is all good and its been hard for you to rain on people’s Mini parade.
Would somone comment on the following points?
A.Mac Mini has only 1 Dimm slot loaded with a incredibly small 256 MB of Ram and that 430 Euros (BTO Italy) to have it with 1 GB where (open market) you can find a 1 GB stick for 180 euros. Hey … Apple is “stealing” my money here.
B.All MAcs comes standard with ONLY 256 MBs, apple should start using 512 as the minimum and the top end configuration (like dual 2.X Ghz should have 1 GB at least)
C. It was not mandatory to build it such small .. no? However I am sure they could have found space for a line in – mic and a third USB connector.
The issue is that they give me Ilife05 (cool software suite, definitly worth money and adding significant value to the unit) with it with Garage Band and if I want to record some audio I need to buy the “iMic”. I simply do not understand why I need to buy a USB Mic if every PC on the planet got a built in mic or at least a line in.
The USB issue is that once you have plugged the mouse and the keyboard you will simply find out by yourself that you won’t be able to connect a printer because that old evil legacy LTP printer port is not there and you do not have a spare USB connector left. (same goes for the iMic no?)
I noticed ppl say’ng that buy’ng it as an home server would be great but having only a 100 Mbps ethernet interface is too limiting.
I know Apple but guys … adding
1 USD for a third USB
3 USD for GibE
1 USD for line – in
5 USD total = a more flexible system
IF you even consider that they wanted it small and cool and were forced to use expensive laptop HDs … let me say that sometimes I hardly understand them.
They could have introduced a system double the size .. still very small but with regular HD drive and even room for 2 memory DIMMS instead of 1.
They would have saved money on some parts and could have added 512 by defaults asking even 50 Bucks more.
Am I totaly wrong?
I know is a entry level system … but sometimes the marketing department gets complitely mad.
As said … already … at the end of the day I will buy it … my first mac ever
Only 2 things that are not fully clear:
QA.if I buy the basic system and then replace the 256 MB stickl (what a waste) will I loose the warranty?
QB. Memory pre-loaded is DDR 333 … is a trick for Apple to even save more bucks or the system is actually limited to 333? isn’t it a marketing trick to load it with DDR 333 to make it look like slower then Imac?
C. If I order it now I am sure It might take over a month to get it … approaching to Tiger Release, will I have a voucher for free Tiger Upgrade?
Do they want me to shell out 130 euros ?
thanks in advance for your time and help.
I am not seeking for flames dudes!
Actually, most people in media production won’t use XP because of it.
I think you’ll find a great deal of people in that market segment are using Macs because “that’s what they’ve always used”, things like colour calibration and the tools available than “multitasking”. Just my (admittedly limited) experience with people who work (or have worked) in those fields.
Even so, there a lot of people who use Windows as well. You’ll have to work pretty hard to convince me they _all_ think it sucks.
You said you did earlier. I don’t mean hardware tuning btw, I mean software settings.
Where ? I didn’t think I had. I certainly can’t think of any tuning I’ve done (well, unless you call changing the default theme “tuning”).
Actually, most people in media production won’t use XP because of it.
I think you’ll find a great deal of people in that market segment are using Macs because “that’s what they’ve always used”, things like colour calibration and the tools available than “multitasking”. Just my (admittedly limited) experience with people who work (or have worked) in those fields.
Even so, there a lot of people who use Windows as well. You’ll have to work pretty hard to convince me they _all_ think it sucks.
You said you did earlier. I don’t mean hardware tuning btw, I mean software settings.
Where ? I didn’t think I had. I certainly can’t think of any tuning I’ve done.
Not sure how copying and pasting could be slow, but menu’s and scrolling are graphical effects in OS X.
Slow to react. As in, hit Cmd+V and there’s a brief delay before whatever-it-is actually appears.
The menus fade in and out, and the scroll bars have an aqua effect (from theme templates, from what I can tell, they have 16 different images that make up a scroll bar).
Actually the menus only fade out, not in – and that’s just a simple alpha effect Windows manages to do without much problem. As with the scrolling, it’s not the scrollbar that bothers me, its the speed documents scroll (and the paud between hitting page down or spacebar and the page actually moving).
Yeah, that’s what we were referring to. It’s one of the things Apple shows off a lot. They play a bunch of videos, resize some, minimize some to the dock, move them around.
Well, given it’s almost all handled by the video card with little actual OS or other hardware interaction, I’d hope it was flawless
.
As I keep trying to get across, despite being constantly ignored. I really like OS X. Most of the things it does are very cool, great for productivity and technically superior to Windows. It’s just that I (and many others, including Anand, when his comments aren’t being
All apps are composed of instructions and CPUs execute instructions, so all apps are cpu bound, understood.
Incorrect. Many apps are bound by other aspects of the system’s performance, such as disk or network I/O, memory bandwidth or even graphics performance. Most games, for example, are often not CPU bound, but limited by the video card (assuming a fairly quick CPU like a 3Ghz P4).
If you’ve got a reasonable sized database, no amount of faster CPU (or better CPU scheduling) in the world is going to help you if the machine only has 64MB of RAM and a 5400rpm IDE disk. Throw in a gig of RAM and a few 10k RPM SCSI drives, however, (keeping the same CPU) and its performance will increase dramatically.
This is *basic* performance tuning theory. Identifying bottlenecks and fixing them. Dropping a faster CPU into the machine is not always (indeed, these days it rarely is) the way to better performance.
Here is Anand’s take on the Mac Mini. Thought he compalins about the low default shipping memory. He does mention the iMac G5 and how memory was the problem, no where does he mention lagginess in OS X.
Hardly surprising, he’s talking about the hardware, not the software. You’ll also note he criticised the price, which is basically another way of saying they should be giving more hardware for the $$$.
In an *in depth* article on OS X, being used on a machine easily four times as powerful as the Mac Mini he does indeed indicate that the OS X UI is not as snappy as he would like, or the alternatives. Cherry picking opinions to suit your prejudice is rather dishonest.
Yeah the Mini’s speed will be just fine. Anand has access to the fastest PC hardware imaginable and he digs it so its all good.
Given Anand can’t possibly have actually used a Mini, and he criticises the responsiveness of a machine with easily four times the performance, I’m not quite sure what point you’re trying to make.
Mr. Smith, almost 300 comments here and over 500 comments in the other Mini article and less than 10 people agree with you!
Amazing how often the “popular” argument gets brought up by the same type of people who dismiss it when it doesn’t support their viewpoint.
I didn’t expect everyone to agree with me, particularly on a thread full of Mac users.
These Mini’s are going to be hot sellers.
I agree. They’ll be walking out the door in droves.
That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. It could have been better.
Next year when Apple comes out with a G5 Mini it will be the same old whing from ya.
Probably because when they do it’ll still be a poor cousin in terms of hardware specifications to the rest of the Mac line.
And there probably still won’t be a headless iMac.
Its too small, its too fast, its too cool, not enough heat, no dual processors no RaADEON X1000. Too integrated no fibre channel card no internal RAID, RAID 1 sux, blah blah blah. In every Mac thread you have always been hateful.
The word you’re after is “critical”. I’ve never asked for anything unreasonable, nor given criticism without justification. I never expected this machine to have dual processors, a fire breathing video card, RAID, or anything like that. All I wanted was a headless iMac (ie: a G5, even if it was clocked down to 1.4Ghz), ideally with an AGP mounted video card. Personally, I would have been more than happy to accept a larger enclosure (eg: the size of the old G4 Cube) for those additional benefits.
” A.Mac Mini has only 1 Dimm slot loaded with a incredibly small 256 MB of Ram and that 430 Euros (BTO Italy) to have it with 1 GB where (open market) you can find a 1 GB stick for 180 euros. Hey … Apple is “stealing” my money here.”
True, and don’t but it from Apple. Go through MacMall or someone who doubles the RAM for free.
” B.All MAcs comes standard with ONLY 256 MBs, apple should start using 512 as the minimum and the top end configuration (like dual 2.X Ghz should have 1 GB at least)”
Also true. They need to update that policy.
” C. It was not mandatory to build it such small .. no? However I am sure they could have found space for a line in – mic and a third USB connector.”
The smallness adds to the cool factor for people who don’t know what USB is. They are going to be pushing the brand name recognition into overdrive now.
” The issue is that they give me Ilife05 (cool software suite, definitly worth money and adding significant value to the unit) with it with Garage Band and if I want to record some audio I need to buy the “iMic”. I simply do not understand why I need to buy a USB Mic if every PC on the planet got a built in mic or at least a line in.”
If you are serious about recording audio, this isn’t the machine for you. Then again, if you are serious about recording audio, neither is an iMac. Think USB mixer for that. I think they are leaving a mic off because their displays have them built in. Other people’s don’t, I know, but then again they want you to buy more of their stuff (hence the $20 price drop on both keyboards and mice).
” The USB issue is that once you have plugged the mouse and the keyboard you will simply find out by yourself that you won’t be able to connect a printer because that old evil legacy LTP printer port is not there and you do not have a spare USB connector left. (same goes for the iMic no?)”
The mouse plugs into the keyboard, leaving the second USB port on the back open, and another still open on the keyboard. So after the keyboard and mouse, you still have 2 open USB ports.
” I noticed ppl say’ng that buy’ng it as an home server would be great but having only a 100 Mbps ethernet interface is too limiting.”
Not for home use really. I don’t think they meant heavy duty server, just a media server for in house use. As in, an extra computer plugged into the TV and stereo that stores your media files and runs OS X.
” I know Apple but guys … adding
1 USD for a third USB
3 USD for GibE
1 USD for line – in
5 USD total = a more flexible system”
Again, true. They could’ve, but they didn’t need to. This way they can also upgrade it in 6 months without spending much money.
” IF you even consider that they wanted it small and cool and were forced to use expensive laptop HDs … let me say that sometimes I hardly understand them.”
Lol. Stop trying to understand them, save yourself the headache.
” They could have introduced a system double the size .. still very small but with regular HD drive and even room for 2 memory DIMMS instead of 1.”
” They would have saved money on some parts and could have added 512 by defaults asking even 50 Bucks more.”
And loose the cool factor (ooh, it’s so tiny!)?
” Am I totaly wrong?”
No, mostly right.
” I know is a entry level system … but sometimes the marketing department gets complitely mad.”
I still can’t figure out why they don’t advertise OS X.
” As said … already … at the end of the day I will buy it … my first mac ever”
Congrats. Welcome to the cult.
” Only 2 things that are not fully clear:
QA.if I buy the basic system and then replace the 256 MB stickl (what a waste) will I loose the warranty?”
Rule of thumb for Apple products, if it’s in the manual it won’t void the warranty. RAM upgrades are usually in the manual, but supposedly the mini must be serviced by someone certified. I’d buy it from MacMall and get double the RAM for free.
” QB. Memory pre-loaded is DDR 333 … is a trick for Apple to even save more bucks or the system is actually limited to 333? isn’t it a marketing trick to load it with DDR 333 to make it look like slower then Imac?”
G4’s never had fast RAM. Sad but true. It’s really not as bad as DDR 333 on a PC though, it handles it much better.
” C. If I order it now I am sure It might take over a month to get it … approaching to Tiger Release, will I have a voucher for free Tiger Upgrade?
Do they want me to shell out 130 euros ?”
Another rule of thumb here, you get a free or discounted upgrade if you buy something after they announce a release date for it’s next version. So you’ll probably have to buy Tiger if you buy a Mac mini now. Maybe wait a month and see what happens.
” thanks in advance for your time and help.
I am not seeking for flames dudes!”
Good to see someone really seeking knowledge.
Incorrect. Many apps are bound by other aspects of the system’s performance, such as disk or network I/O, memory bandwidth or even graphics performance. Most games, for example, are often not CPU bound, but limited by the video card (assuming a fairly quick CPU like a 3Ghz P4).
Wrong again. Hold on, you are saying a game is Graphics bound if the cpu is failry fast upwards of 3Ghz. Kind of what I was saying wasn’t it.
The same game will perform slower on a slower cpu regardless of how good the graphics card is and also the load the cpu is on. Let’s say you take your normal workstation load and play a game. The game will most certainly perform better on an unloaded system than in one with your typical load. The game is cpu bound. If it weren’t for a fast enough cpu or a heavy load the graphisc card wouldn’t be stressed as much.
If you’ve got a reasonable sized database, no amount of faster CPU (or better CPU scheduling) in the world is going to help you if the machine only has 64MB of RAM and a 5400rpm IDE disk. Throw in a gig of RAM and a few 10k RPM SCSI drives, however, (keeping the same CPU) and its performance will increase dramatically.
Hold on a second let’s max out the memory to 250 GB and a RAID array of 15KRPM disk and run the database on a 200MHz pentium pro and see how it performs. The cpu will be pinned with disk and network interrupts to do any useful work. Let’s even put it on a single 3 Ghz P$ machine, with a nice emc or IBM TB raid box and see how the cpu is pinned just satisfying I/O interrupts and unable to run a complex SQL quey. You would need a MP box to distribute the interrupts and real workload for useful work to happen.
All apps are cpu bound, code executes to make I/O happen if that code is interrupted or starved performance will suffer. Once the cpu is fast enough the I/O bottlenecks will show up.
Note how in every one of your examples the CPU is always a fast one. It needs to be to keep the I/O busy by making sure the threads that are going to perform the I/O are scheduled quickly and . I never claimed sufficient RAM is not needed or disk through put doesn’t matter.
The corollary is most certainly true. No amount of memory, or disk through put will make your system perform is the cpu is not up to the task for your work load.
This is *basic* performance tuning theory. Identifying bottlenecks and fixing them. Dropping a faster CPU into the machine is not always (indeed, these days it rarely is) the way to better performance.
I never said that. Again house of cards.
“I think you’ll find a great deal of people in that market segment are using Macs because “that’s what they’ve always used”, things like colour calibration and the tools available than “multitasking”. Just my (admittedly limited) experience with people who work (or have worked) in those fields.”
I do have a lot of experience in that field. Windows is almost loathed for many reasons, one of which is it’s poor media handling capabilities. (of course the print industry hates it because of Word, but that’s another story altogether).
” Even so, there a lot of people who use Windows as well. You’ll have to work pretty hard to convince me they _all_ think it sucks.”
Woah. Back up. I never said it sucked, or that everyone in media production don’t like it. OS X has about a 90% market share in the media industry though.
” Where ? I didn’t think I had. I certainly can’t think of any tuning I’ve done.”
No freaking way I’m going all the way back through this thread to find things like that.
” Slow to react. As in, hit Cmd+V and there’s a brief delay before whatever-it-is actually appears.”
Not seeing it.
” Actually the menus only fade out, not in – and that’s just a simple alpha effect Windows manages to do without much problem. As with the scrolling, it’s not the scrollbar that bothers me, its the speed documents scroll (and the paud between hitting page down or spacebar and the page actually moving).”
Watch carefully, they fade in and out. And I’m just not seeing the scrolling problem. They only place I get that is on giant pdfs and in Word.
” Well, given it’s almost all handled by the video card with little actual OS or other hardware interaction, I’d hope it was flawless
.”
It’s handled through QuickTime and Quartz Extreme, mostly on the video card. But so are the scroll bars and menus.
” As I keep trying to get across, despite being constantly ignored. I really like OS X. Most of the things it does are very cool, great for productivity and technically superior to Windows. It’s just that I (and many others, including Anand, when his comments aren’t being”
I hear ya. It’s probably the only reason I’m still on this thread.
I’d like to comment on the thing about apps being CPU bound. You guys seem to be mixing and matching the terms ‘bound’ and ‘bottleneck’. Just trying to sort through the confusion.
” Probably because when they do it’ll still be a poor cousin in terms of hardware specifications to the rest of the Mac line.”
Well it is their low end machine.
“And there probably still won’t be a headless iMac.”
Headless iMac is an oxymoron.
The point about the Mac mini is that it’s Apple’s low end machine. ‘Apple’ being they key word here. They aren’t changing they way the make and sell computers, they are just lowering the specs on a new design. It’s a low end Mac, still at a premium price. Think of it as an incredible OS with great software that comes with a free Mac. Think of it like something that all the geeks who rate everything based on how their mother uses it can give to their mothers to use.