ASIA--or--Another Stupid Inquirer Article

Hey Wheels (#14):

The article was from The Inquirer (a techy website) not The (National) Enquirier (the tabloid).

Keir:(#11)
Quik question: how much RAM do your windows and mac machines have?

XP will not have a huge speed boost from 256MB to 512MB unless you are running more than 2 or 3 applications. For OS X, on the other hand, 512MB should be the bare minmum, and no less than 1GB if you want to run lots of ram-intensive apps. (My powerbook has 512MB RAM, 8 open apps, and 1GB of swap files at the moment)

Also, Jaguar had poor multitasking, so there should be a huge speed boost between it and Panther.

Not saying your comments are false - but they don't match my experience, and i'm just asking for clarification.

Goodness!

Windows runs way faster than OS X, its true. But dang, In many ways Mac OS 9 does too. And Linux totally owns all of the above in the speed department. Don't beleive me? Get a Mac that can boot OS X and OS 9 and see for yourself. OS X, on the other hand, is waaaaaaay more stable, reliable and safe than either windows or os 9.

Personally, I think that OS X is weighed down by a variety of things. But at the end of the day, It still owns over windows.

I have had a windows partition since Bootcamp was released. However, I only use XP for GAMES. Aside from that, XP is totally worthless as it is severly lacking in the features and stability departments. XP is basically a glorified Xbox.

>>Keir

Dude, You can cunsttruct your own Mac. It's just way expensive. And there is no way a random user is going to build a more stable macintosh computer than Apple. You can get away with that with windows, because it isn't so reliant on running on specific hardware to be on the other end. Plus, Apple doesn't want a repeat of the Mac Clone invasion. That nearly killed Apple as a company.

The stuff at the Inquirer is actually a lot better than TUAW. I mean, TUAW is ok, but it doesn't hold a candle to something like Engadget writing and style. It's more like the frustrated little brother trying to do what it can't. I always have the feeling that TUAW is written by kids in high-school. Not that that's bad, but it's kind of weak sometimes.
I wouldn't have said anything if you hadn't bashed them so bluntly.
Take a look at the way Engadget bashed Pogue, who deserves it, with his Skype-box-thing a couple weeks ago.

First the Onion, now the Inquirer, what's next - The Weekly World News?

Keir, thank you thank you thank you.

You've stated my sentiments quite well.

I don't know if anyone has been keeping up on the news lately. But apparently the video card is underclocked under Mac OS X, probably to keep the heat down and battery life up. If you reset the card to run at full speed under Mac OS X supposedly you get roughly the same performance.

Now, everyone knows that gaming works better on a windows based machine than a Mac. Probably due to the superior hardware setups that can be created. Sure you can get a mac with reasonable hardware, but you can't beat say an ATI X1800XT.
I know you can upgrade the bits in Mac's, but you can't really build your own (Don't anyone mention the customize 'feature' on their store. Its....limited) which is a big downside.

I have a mac and have been using it for about 3 or 4 years now. I have been using Windows since pretty much the dawn of time.

Windows is faster than MacOS X. That fact is simple. For starters, I can run Windows XP faster on my old P3 500mhz PC (Legendary machine!) than I can run OS X on my 866mhz Mac. Sure, OS X is newer, but there doesnt really seem to be any additions aside from Dashboard that could really slow it down that much. Jaguar ran fine on my PowerBook but as the OS gets upgraded, it slows down.

Not only that, but MacOS X (As much as I love it) feels a bit like walking through treacle. Its a bit sticky, and sluggish, whereas Windows feels like your walking through water. Less resistance, faster. You tell my computer to open, and bang, its there. Navigate to a folder, Bang, contents displayed. On MacOS X you open a finder window, and if it has a reasonable amount of files in it'll take a minute to apparently render the icons, filenames, folder icons and just about anything else in there.

Also, open Mail.app and with a decent amount of emails in, it'll take a hell of a lot longer than Outlook which opens basically the second you tell it to launch.

Another issue I have with MacOS X is its handling of the Mouse. I can't really explain it in detail because I don't know how to, but I know that other people have picked up on this before.

Windows is faster than MacOS. I'm not a Windows / Microsoft fanboy, nor do I dislike Apple. They are both great operating systems, and will continue to improve, but at the end of the day, Windows out-does OS X in terms of speed and response times.

well, it's true that WOW is not exactly an official benchmark, but it's something people will actually use[*]. i don't give much importance to the fact that my pc can crunch 100Megaflops or make the Kessel Run in 1.2 parsecs... IF i am a gamer and IF i see that the same game, on the same computer, runs significantly faster on full detail on WinXP than on MacOS with details tweaked down maybe i'd start wondering a bit...

we all know that, for many reasons, games run better on windoze pc and gamers usually don't buy macs (well, i actually have a powerbook, which i love, and a beigebox for gaming), so having the chance to boot into windows can actually mean that more people could buy just macs (i would be one).

but on the other side rebooting just to check email and browse the net, while i can use the exact same programs on windows, is quite annoying... i used to have a linux partition on all my pc (mac included) but i dumped that when i realized that i never actually booted into it...

oh, well, just my 0.02$...

M

[*] plus i think that benchmarks aren't that reliable, after all... intel, for one, is known to have tweaked its processors to run better numbers at benchmarks, while not increasing the actual use performance...

The reviewer said that he preferred using OS X, but it was a little difficult to justify when a game runs twice as fast under Windows.