Apple, Microsoft on Windows on Mac; Benchmarks

[Evangelion]

You see that number people? That's 820. 820 MB. And this is Vista idling. I know OS X is a RAM hog too, but it manages pretty well with the meager 512 that I have on my old iMac G4 (and Im talking about when it's not idling).

I believe that that number has already been discussed in the net, and it has been determined to be 100% meaningless.

Yes, Vista is too little too late

 

[MrCrowbar]

I bought my iMac 20" Core Duo 512MB a week ago. comparing it to my old Asus based desktop with windows, 1.8Ghz P4, 512MB, it feels painfully slow.
Oded S.

Max out the RAM of your iMac. OSX Tiger needs a lot of RAM for decent performance. Your Mac will be twice as fast with enoguh RAM.

 

[Mikael]

I believe he was exaggerating, but seriously... As a graphic artist/web dude, I oftentimes have open Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Classic for Streamline, Mail, iTunes, Word and finally DVD to watch a movie while I work. Do that in Windows. Those are some very BIG GUN programs, yet Apple can handle it.

And exactly how is that going to be a hard load for a Windows system? Just curious.

Sometimes I wonder if some of you guys ever even sat at a Windows computer... Reformat every month? What the hell!

 

[Evangelion]

Check out your processes on a Windows PC and Mac. More is running that you would think. Perhaps apps isn't the correct statement.

Processes are not same as applications, IMO. "Process" involvoes all kinds of background-things that spend most of their time doing practically nothing. When you talk of "applications", you talk of programs that the user specificly loads and actively uses.

 

[Evangelion]

I run them, every day. At least 30.
13 professional graphics applications, plus dozens of utilities and productivity applications of all sorts.

you are then part of that 0.01% minority. Could you name the apps you run at the same time?

My PowerMac has 12 GB of RAM, something that Windows can't even cope with.

64bit Windows can.

So, I hope you finally begin to understand that comparing Windows and Mac OS X is same as comparing your car with USS Enterprise E.

So what if YOU run zillion apps at once on your computer. 99% of users run 3-5 apps AT MOST. So talking about using the system with 30 running apps is for all intents and purposes academic.

 

[Evangelion]

Well I know it hurts some of the Mac Fanboys here to think this and/or you'll continue in some alternate reality but Microsuck certainly DOESN'T mind being able to run XPee on the Mac... why would they? When they have to bundle XPee on a Dull, Hewsh|t Packturd, Chumpac, Hateway, they only get about $50 per license. If someone has to actually buy their OS, they make $100-150 per sale of XPee. Microsuck, bottom line, is a business, and as such they like making money. To sell copies of their craptacularly woeful OS at retail price to them is a good thing... it's more profit, and like any company more profit is a great thing. It's the other peecee makers listed above that wont be congratulating Apple, after all, they're the ones that may lose a sale, if a switcher buys a Mac because now he/she can run both OSes that doens't hurt Microsuck any.

So that being said, those that may steal XPee as warez or whatever depriving M$ of more profit, I won't lose any sleep over that.

I must say, your rabid fanboyness and pure hatred of anything related to PC's and Windows still cracks me up . Now, that's not propably your intention, but you do offer me quite a bit of amusement. That said, I think you should really work on renewing your repertoire. It's getting a bit old.

 

[asencif]

And exactly how is that going to be a hard load for a Windows system? Just curious.

Sometimes I wonder if some of you guys ever even sat at a Windows computer... Reformat every month? What the hell!

As a Mac and Win tech, I can definitely be careful with a Windows system and secure it and never have really gotten one infected, however the reality is that this is the minority. The majority have gotten infected with spyware, slowdowns, crashes, driver issues, and even corporations I've worked for have had major shutdowns because of attacks. You may be fine and say this can all run great...I don't understand etc....Just go to many Win forums and you'll see countless posts of strange problems and system instability. Just like there have been a few Mac users with HW issues there has also been some Win users with no problems, however that is not too common. OS X right now has been more stable, run more apps at a time better, and for most switchers they have found the OS X experience to be much easier and productive.

 

[Arnaud]

I bought my iMac 20" Core Duo 512MB a week ago. comparing it to my old Asus based desktop with windows, 1.8Ghz P4, 512MB, it feels painfully slow. opening Pages takes well over six seconds. opening dashboard is very slow (and at first, the effect is "jammed", until appearing on screen for the first time). I gave up using safari because like every other Apple product, it sucks for international and right-to-left users. Camino is pretty good as alternative. Importing a short DV clip to iMovie HD was a disater in time (over 5 minutes). What's there to import? what takes it so long? I won't even start talking about using iMovie HD, it is close to impossible as a movie editor. I am currently writing those words from the old P4, and it's still VERY snappy, years after I bought it. It is filled with tons of apps, too. include anti virus.

Hello, first of all, expand your ram. 512Mb on an Intel iMac is useless if you want to use something more than the Findr. Yes, Apple should say it, but go for 1 or 1.5Gb.

Second, I don't know about the size of your clip, but iMovie imports the whole file, so you've got disk issues here, beyond the cpu performances. Final Cut Express, on the other hand, does not import the content and is a more real movie editor. iMovie is mostly to transfer/edit your camcorder tapes to a dvd... (but I do like its simplicity).

Good luck then.

 

[slidingjon]

This is all very interesting, but I buy mac products to run the Mac OS. I just got my 17" coreduo imac this week and it rocks! It sure beats the pants off my 800mhz ibook g4! (speaking of which...anyone want a used ibook?....)
The mac os is great. It is clean, runs well, networks incredibly well. However, I can understand certain niche needs for windows (at this point). Hopefully that will all soon go away as people realize that not only do macs look great, but they run great. Soon people will realize that if they want to save money in IT, run macs.

 

[ITR 81]

This is a beta of Vista, it will probably much better once they take the debugging and logging code out.

Even MS said the Min was going to be 1GB of ram to run it and 2GB for top performance.

Thats a good bit of ram to just run the OS...not mention games and what not.

 

[ImAlwaysRight]

So, I hope you finally begin to understand that comparing Windows and Mac OS X is same as comparing your car with USS Enterprise E.

Your car may take you to the pizza shop in 5 minutes, but USS Enterprise can take you to the next star system.

Seriously, good anaolgy though.

Yeah, but would you take the USS Enterprise to the pizza shop?

In other words, do you mow your tiny yard in the city with a tractor?

 

[macFanDave]

When Vista comes out I bet the tables will turn dramatically.

If Vista comes out.

 

[ArizonaKid]

Luckily OS X Did Not Go Against AMD

OS X is still limited to the Pentium M (Centrino Duo/Core) family. Although this comparison was intended to show similar conditions; taking all processor options into account OS X would be toast against a Windows Machine on AMD Athlon™ 64 FX or even AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core.

Which is all the more reason for Apple's Desktop to incorporate AMD's line of processors as well. That would really be a great bombshell!

 

[weldon]

I think this is great for Apple, as they will have something completely objective to test against when working to improve the Mach kernel.

I agree. I think this is going to force Apple to work very hard on optimizing the OS for Intel so that it will compare favorably with Linux and Windows running on similar (or the same) hardware. This is going to bring more competition to the computing world and we should see innovative solutions come from it. (I hope!)

 

[ITR 81]

And exactly how is that going to be a hard load for a Windows system? Just curious.

Sometimes I wonder if some of you guys ever even sat at a Windows computer... Reformat every month? What the hell!

Never used Windows XP pro that much...but I've used Win98SE to know it will die on you. Even without a virus my PC died and wouldn't even boot up.
Just kept giving me the BSOD and I'm not even sure why..since I wasn't connected to the net(dialup back then)

 

[Arnaud]

Even MS said the Min was going to be 1GB of ram to run it and 2GB for top performance.

Thats a good bit of ram to just run the OS...not mention games and what not.

Come on, that's evolution anyway. Remember the Apple IIe? 64Ko of ram standard ! In 15 years, we'll use 1Tb for the system...

 

[Evangelion]

I believe he was exaggerating, but seriously... As a graphic artist/web dude, I oftentimes have open Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Classic for Streamline, Mail, iTunes, Word and finally DVD to watch a movie while I work. Do that in Windows. Those are some very BIG GUN programs, yet Apple can handle it.

So you have.... 9 apps running at once? I usually have Lotus Notes (which is an gargantuan app), Peregrine Service Center, Smartmail Management Console, Active Directory Management Console, Firefox with over dozen tabs, Winamp and occasionally Word and Powerpoint on top of that. So that's 6-8 apps running simultaneously. And I don't see any problems with the system, and I can't see how things would change if I added few apps in to the mix.

Some of our users run Access with huge files, Word, Lotus Notes, IE, Excel with huge files (100MB+), PowerPoint with huge files etc. etc, all at the same time, and they don't seem to be having any issues.

I know it's fashinable to bash Windows, and Windows IS crap (believe me, I use it every day). But it IS pretty stable, and it handles multitasking just fine.

 

[MrCrowbar]

This really is the worst kind FUD. Perhaps you should run a Windows machine newer than say 1995 or with more than 256 meg of RAM. I'm running Outlook, virus protection, Websphere application developer, IIS, Word, iTunes, SQL Server, IE, Corel Photopaint, about half a dozen server processes for the web app I'm working on, yahoo chat, and all the silly asset management things my company adds on a 2 ghz Pentium 4-M (about a 3 year old laptop) with 1 gig of RAM. It runs fine. Windows has the same problem OSX has, if starved of RAM it runs like crap, if you've got enough RAM it's fine.

I should define "using applications". I don't mean just having the app open. iTunes is importing to mp3, Photoshop is doing filter work on 30Meg files, Word is... I don't really know what Word does to suck the system dry...
I have the working apps opend on the small screen and use the big one for the app I'm interacting with. On windows thins kind of work chokes a bit, OSX is very snappy here, i.e I can control my apps without waiting like in windows.

However I admit XP i superior to OSX for gaming and light applications.

 

[ImAlwaysRight]

Windows on Intel should be faster than OS X on Intel...They've been doing it for at least 15 years.What do people expect?..Big deal.So an app opens 1 second faster in XP..Is that what people really want? An app to open a little faster? no way.People want a computer that is trustworthy,stable and most importantly virus free..

Then why do they spend hundreds more to go from 2.0GHz to 2.16GHz if they don't care about things being slightly faster?

 

[socamx]

Why is it that Apple includes virus protection with a dotmac account? "Virus protection built right in."

I guess the software engineers at Apple don't know OS X very well, huh?

Silly wabbit, virii are for Windows.

Apple is just preventing Mac users from spreading a virus to a Windows friend unintentionally. Mac users wouldn't get affected by a Windows virus in an email and such but we can still pass it on to Windows users.

 

[DJTJ]

Running xp on my mac would be like taking my porsche engine and putting it in a chevy cobalt. Its NOT gonna happen.

 

[Evangelion]

Even MS said the Min was going to be 1GB of ram to run it and 2GB for top performance.

IIRC, they recommended 1GB. And I find it pretty funny that you blast Vista's memory-requirement, when people are constantly telling that "Get as much RAM as possible, Tiger just LOVES RAM!"

512 is the absolute minimium for OS X, with 1GB being "enough". I fail to see any dramatic difference between OS X and Vista as far as memory-consumption is concerned.

 

[Cabbit]

after useing vista in beta for some time its kinda ok. ram hog yes but it beats the pants of windows xp. it has some strong points over os x but is weak in others. The planned kill-of of opengl in vista is a big downer. Micro$oft is trying to make all the big pro apps switch to DirectX or suffer one opengl app at a time with reduced access to the hardware.

 

[ArizonaKid]

Stop the Car Analogies

Running xp on my mac would be like taking my porsche engine and putting it in a chevy cobalt. Its NOT gonna happen.

Enough with all these car analogies already.

 

[ITR 81]

you are then part of that 0.01% minority. Could you name the apps you run at the same time?



64bit Windows can.



So what if YOU run zillion apps at once on your computer. 99% of users run 3-5 apps AT MOST. So talking about using the system with 30 running apps is for all intents and purposes academic.

I hope you know the guy didn't mean Apps he meant processes..which means I'm running 18-19 processes and have around 7-8 apps running...on 512mb of ram.
Check how many processes your running because not all proc. are visible...like an app is.