Switcher Switched Back - Too Slow They Say

[ScottW]

Well, I "Switched" to family members to Mac OS X two weeks ago. One has a brand new 17" iMac, the other got a G4 Cube.

Both gave me the same immediate complaint... "It's SLOW". How in the hell do you respond to that? Cause side by side... when using things that these people use every day like IE, it's freak'n slow. My response is scrapping the barrel.. "OS X has move overhead, a better platform, might seem a bit slower than your Windows box, but in raw power, its much faster." "It can wiz by and complete photoshop scripts in half the time as your Windows box." ----- BIG DEAL to people who don't run Photoshop scripts.

Honestly folks... Apple doesn't have a product thats worth switching for... when it comes to internet surfing and the price factor.

So, one family member, the G4 Cube owner is going back to her PII-450mhz which in her opinion was TWICE as fast as the G4/450mhz system, with more than 3 times the amount of ram as her Windows box.

The 17" iMac member... still likes the look of it... the design and attractiveness of the interface outweighed the slowness - thus far.

Anyone want to buy a G4 Cube?

Admin

[Sogni]

1 Ghz AMD Athlon running Windows XP here at the office... No speed difference vs my Mac at home (dual 533mhz 10.2 Jaguar) and the Server at the office (Dual 1Ghz OS X 10.2 Server) kicks everyone's butt (refering to my computers only).

And this is without even running Photoshop!

I don't understand why people keep saying it's Slow!!!???

I'll take the Cube - you did say it was free, right?

[dave17lax]

maybe they meant that windows is more snappy than osx. the windows just open faster. other than that, what's the difference? i say let them go, your family sucks!

[~~NeYo~~]

LOL!

Man, i'd love a Cube ... but living in England?! ... a shame!

NeYo

[sheepguy42]

Also, the graphics card in the cube does not support Quartz Extreme (unless it was upgraded) so Jaguar may be sluggish. I have noticed that while some things are faster on mine, others seem slower or less responsive (more beachball curser action than the rainbow circle ever saw in 10.1). I will post more on this when I havetime, and in a more appropriate forum if there is one.

[themacko]

It is slow. I am using Jaguar on an eMac with 128 mb of ram .. and it's workable, but nothing to be proud of. Compaired to a comprable Windows machine (with only 128 mb) it out-right sucks.

[dave17lax]

ok I will submit a more thoughtful comment: My girlfriend's compaq has a faster UI than my dual g4, and even sometimes faster web browsing. BUT, if the g4 slows down, the system just feels like a foot has been taken off the gas. When her pc slows down, it feels like the petal is to the metal, but we aint goin nowhere because they packed the miata full of 80 lb bags of sandbox sand.

Also (OT) one thing I love about OSX is the process viewer app in the utilities folder. This will show everything running, including stuff that's not in the dock. You can see how much ram something's using, as well as the CPU usage. This is awesome - after installing jaguar, one of my menu apps was causing a huge slowdown to the system. It felt like the public beta or something. I opened process viewer and found that that little app was causing the whole thing. i made the offender quit, then relaunched it and all was fine. These are the things that make macs great.

[ulrik]

there is nothing you can reply.

Macs are slow compared to PCs, even Photoshop has been lost, current AMDs and Pentiums outperform the Dual 1 Ghz PowerMac.

Everybody who still believes what Apple is telling them is a victim of Apples clever marketing strategies.

The question is: does it matter if it is slower? If my browsers takes one second longer to render a webpage, but due to a more intuitive OS I can find files 30 seconds faster than in windows, doesn't it balance it out? If I don't have to reboot my computer three times a day cause two of my third-party PCI cards can't seem to like each other, isn't that worth anything?

Do NOT try to compare Macs and PCs by pure speed, at least not at the moment, no Mac will win to a similar priced PC. Even the xServe has been beaten by Dell PowerEdges and HP Proliants over and over again in any benchmark I have seen, but when it comes to desktop machines, speed isn't everything. I guess if you add up the seconds a PC user has to spend due to lacking drag and drop abilities between some apps, you get the difference back in which an AMD outperforms a Mac in Photoshop at the moment. I'd even say in many circumstances, you can get work done in the same time as on a PC, even though the PC actually runs faster. Not in every case, but in many.

Sadly but truly, I am getting deeper and deeper into the 3D bussiness, and so I spent more time every day on my PC and on my SGI, the Mac is just too slow for similar work.