Performance Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Snow Leopard performance improvements are there, but small

by Casey Johnston (Aug 27th, 2009)

Snow Leopard is purported to provide many small but much-needed tweaks to its predecessor, Leopard. One oft-touted tweak is a speed boost, but according to tests by Macworld the performance and speed of a few different computers improved only slightly with many native tasks, and some took even ...

iPhone 3G S is crazy fast at 3D compared to iPhone 3G

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jun 22nd, 2009)

They didn't just slap an S on the back and call it a day, you know. Apple has improved the 3D performance on the 3G S by including a more powerful graphics processor. According to John Casasanta, the speed increase is up to four times that of the 3G. But don't take his word or these OpenGL ES speed ...

Livin' on the edge with optimized, beta Firefox builds

by Michael Rose (Feb 8th, 2009)

Do you feel the need... the need for speed? With more and more of our computing lives taking place via our web browsers, eking out even a slight performance improvement for Firefox or Safari (or a similar reduction of resource demands; I'm looking at you, Flash Player) can improve the user ...

TouchArcade: Second-generation iPod touch faster than iPhone

by Robert Palmer (Nov 24th, 2008)

TouchArcade interviewed Handheld Games Corp's Thomas Fessler, who noted an interesting bit of the company's research: Second-generation iPod touch devices are significantly faster than their predecessors when it comes to 3D rendering. In fact, it's faster than both iPhone models as well. In its ...

Screaming fast Mozilla browser Minefield gives a glimpse of Firefox's future

by Jason Clarke (Oct 26th, 2008)

I was really disappointed when Google released their Chrome web browser for Windows only. When it comes to browsers, I've tried them all. Right now I regularly switch between Firefox and the latest nightly build from Webkit (essentially Safari). Firefox has the extensibility I rely on, while Webkit ...

CNET Labs benchmarks Parallels and Fusion virtualization products

by David Chartier (Aug 20th, 2007)

Whenever two options are presented, it is often a smart move to weight the pros and cons of each and make a decision based on your needs. If you need to push Windows in a virtualization environment, Daniel A. Begun at CNET Labs has benchmarked Windows Vista running in both Parallels Desktop and ...

Up to 3GB of RAM in the Mac minis

by Mike Schramm (Aug 18th, 2007)

Reader John L kindly dropped us a tip that Other World Computing has upped their Mac mini memory upgrades up to a whopping 3GB of RAM. And in fact, if you really want a Mini that flies, they'll even squeeze 4GB under the hood, even though they say the Mac Mini can't really handle that much. The ...

Widget Watch: iStat pro 4.1 released

by David Chartier (Jun 14th, 2007)

iSlayer has released v4.1 of their killer iStat pro widget for monitoring system performance and statistics right from within Dashboard. In this new version, the team has added a new Fire skin (pictured, and apparently a mod of a much-requested skin from the previous v3), support for monitoring ...

Is Safari a system resource hog?

by David Chartier (Feb 27th, 2007)

A browser doesn't seem like it should have that adverse of an effect on one's system performance. Aside from the power users who surf for hours at a time and leave their browser running for days on end, one's browser shouldn't be dragging the rest of the class down. Macenstein, on the other hand, ...

Bullish on Apple?

by Erica Sadun (Dec 17th, 2006)

Alyce Lomax, blogging over at the Motley Fool, discusses her take on Apple's stock performance. Over the last five years, Apple has boomed -- up 715%. Lomax believes that Apple has not yet peaked. She sees growth opportunities in the Intel line of Macs along with the strong performance of the ...

Apple issues support doc for wonky AirPort performance on Intel Macs

by David Chartier (Oct 3rd, 2006)

Sketchy AirPort performance has been bugging me for weeks, probably over a month now, and I've been going through all forms of troubleshooting with my AirPort Express trying to squash the issue, but to no avail. My MacBook and iMac drop their Wi-Fi connection seemingly at random, sometimes right in ...

Mac Pro benchmark roundup

by David Chartier (Aug 11th, 2006)

Other sites are already getting their hands on Mac Pros and putting them through the benchmark ringer, and since we aren't done checking the couch for change yet, I figured a benchmark roundup would be the best way to let you sink your teeth into some cold, hard numbers. If you've been waiting to ...

New Parallels Desktop beta enables better USB, performance, integration

by David Chartier (Aug 8th, 2006)

Parallels must have been missing their beta days, as they have already announced a new beta version of their Desktop software at WWDC today that brings quite a few much-requests updates. Parallels Desktop, in case you haven't been following the Mac web the last few months, is virtualization ...

Macworld delves into gaming on the MacBook

by David Chartier (Jun 3rd, 2006)

While the performance line between Apple's high and low end mid-range portable notebooks has lost some serious girth with the introduction of the MacBook, anyone hoping to snag a portable Mac for gaming has some tough decisions to make. The Pro machine packs a a high-end dedicated 3D card that can ...

MacTech benchmarks Office 2004 on Rosetta

by David Chartier (Apr 23rd, 2006)

MacTech has published what I am fairly certain are the comprehensive Office 2004 on Rosetta test results for Intel Macs. Honestly, there is so much literature and testing in this article that I simply skimmed most of it and skipped ahead to the conclusion: "in general, Office 2004 under Rosetta ...