Originally posted by pgulliver
I use a 500 mhz iBook running 10.2.4 (320 MB of RAM), and my girlfriend has a 466 mhz Celeron running Win2k. They are roughly equivalent hardware wise (500 mhz G3 is a better processor than the 466 mhz Celeron, but really both processors are totally crippled by a 66 mhz memory bus), and I would have to say that I don't really think her Windows machine is any "snappier" than my iBook. Safari definitely "feels" faster on the iBook than IE does on the Celeron. Now, in fairness, the Celeron only has 128 MB of RAM, but even running only one or two apps right after restart - when memory shouldn't be much of an issue - it still doesn't seem particularly fast. Of course, the Pentium4 desktops in our computer lab generally feel more responsive than the 500 mhz iBook, but that is no surprise. They do feel less stable when running several apps though (as in, apps crash more often, though they generally don't bring down the OS), despite the fact that they are all running WinXP/Win2k.
Until the release of Safari, I would have said that the two important apps with performance problems on the Mac platform are the browser and Office. Now I would just say Office. Excel and Word under OS X definitely lag running on a 500 mhz iBook. It's been a while since I was forced to use Office extensively on the Windows platform, but I would bet that it performs significantly better on equivalent hardware (though with all the bloat they keep adding, who knows). Office 2001 for Mac performed okay, however, so hopefully over time Office for OS X will improve. Furthermore, you should be aware that the new Powerbooks and iBooks are in general MUCH more responsive than my 500 mhz iBook (the 66 mhz bus must really cripple this thing), so I assume that Office performance is similarly improved (which is to say, it should be usable, if not exactly lightning fast).
As for RAM, more than 256 MB could definitely make a difference. In particular, a demo model may not have been restarted in some time, so a lot of the memory may be in use from various processes that have not been quit and memory leaks. So even if you have only a couple apps open, a high percentage of the physical memory could be in use if the machine hasn't been restarted in a long time. I would definitely recommend upgrading to 640 MB.
As a final note, it's not really fair to compare application opening speeds on a G4 laptop versus a PIII desktop. Laptop hard drives spin at much lower speeds than desktop drives, and drive speed will be the main factor in determining how fast apps open. I still think Windows will be a bit faster on this metric than OS X on equivalent hardware, but that is just because OS X is still being optimized. I really wouldn't worry too much about it - once you open an app in OS X you can just keep it open if you have enough RAM.
In just about everything other than the specific performance concerns related above (i.e. running Office on my extra-slow hardware), the Mac is just so much better than the PC. There aren't as many games of course, but I don't have enough time to waste playing tons of games (and if I did, I'd get a PS2 anyway). It's just so much more refined and it works better. In my opinion it's like comparing a Lexus to a Taurus...if you tune the Taurus's engine right, it will probably be faster, but I'd still rather be driving the Lexus any day.
