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Are mac's slower tha PC's?

aditghai

aditghai

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 25, 2007
188
0
I have been using a C2D 2.4 GHZ MBP that my friend let me borrow and I noticed that compared to my 1.6 GHZ C2D Dell XPS M1530, some things are slower on a mac. An example:

-Opening Applications especially like word and excel take so much longer on a mac.

-If you hit CMD-P on a Mac it takes about 2 seconds for the print menu to slide in from the top in a pretty way. On my Dell hitting CTRL P instantly shows an uglier print window.

Is it because OS X is heavy on graphics and makes an extra effort to make things look prettier and graphically better, that makes things slow?
 
The latest version of office with all updates installed on both machines
 
For Microsoft Office - yes. 1000x slower. We have old PCs at school that are at least 4 years old and they open Microsoft Office 2007 almost instantly (1 or 2 second max). On my new mac it takes 30 + seconds. But what do you expect? Microsoft wont develop a decent OSX application.
 
aditghai said:
I have been using a C2D 2.4 GHZ MBP that my friend let me borrow and I noticed that compared to my 1.6 GHZ C2D Dell XPS M1530, some things are slower on a mac. An example:

-Opening Applications especially like word and excel take so much longer on a mac.

-If you hit CMD-P on a Mac it takes about 2 seconds for the print menu to slide in from the top in a pretty way. On my Dell hitting CTRL P instantly shows an uglier print window.

Is it because OS X is heavy on graphics and makes an extra effort to make things look prettier and graphically better, that makes things slow?
Click to expand...

Microsoft Office for Mac is a really bad program, slow and a memory hog. Microsoft Office for Windows is a great program, very fast and low on memory usage.

Some programs are slower on Macs because they are the result of a PC conversion. As a result, the Windows version (i.e., the original one) ends up being faster.
 
Both versions of Office are still obscene pieces of complicated crap.

iWork craps all over Powerpoint (with Keynote), Word and Published (Pages) and Numbers, for basic stuff, is a hell of a lot more accessible than Excel. Grab Bento and you'll never need Access either.

Granted, Numbers has a LOT to be desired compared to Excel, which excels (pun intended) at more complicated business tasks. If Numbers were to support Macros (as well as some of the higher functions) it'd kill Excel any day.

Personally, I think iWork should be sold in a PC version too... oh the converts that would be made...
 
I haven't noticed one being any faster than the other, either opening, closing, printing, or whatever.

I do like the UI of the Mac version better than the 2003 PC version.
 
NathanCH said:
For Microsoft Office - yes. 1000x slower. We have old PCs at school that are at least 4 years old and they open Microsoft Office 2007 almost instantly (1 or 2 second max). On my new mac it takes 30 + seconds. But what do you expect? Microsoft wont develop a decent OSX application.
Click to expand...

Try removing WYSISYG option on Word prefs, opens in 4"
 
I switched to open office AGES ago. I love it :) Neo office or open office on the mac are both great. Neo office however will give you the option to save has docx format which is office 2007 word files.
 
chrono1081 said:
I switched to open office AGES ago. I love it :) Neo office or open office on the mac are both great. Neo office however will give you the option to save has docx format which is office 2007 word files.
Click to expand...

NeoOffice is a Mac port of OpenOffice, plain and simple. {Neo, Open}Office version 3 added support for the Office OpenXML files (docx, pptx, xlsx, etc.). For OpenOffice, version 3 is the first version to use Cocoa (rather than X11), though NeoOffice still looks nicer. Functionally, they are the same other than NeoOffice's optimizations for OS X.
 
britboyj said:
...and Numbers, for basic stuff, is a hell of a lot more accessible than Excel. Grab Bento and you'll never need Access either.

Granted, Numbers has a LOT to be desired compared to Excel, which excels (pun intended) at more complicated business tasks. If Numbers were to support Macros (as well as some of the higher functions) it'd kill Excel any day.
Click to expand...

Anything you can do in Numbers can be done just as easily in Excel. How can a spreadsheet application not be "accessible" for simple tasks anyways? They both use essentially the same formats and syntax.
 
In my experience, OS X in general performs much slower than Windows on THE SAME computer, and by same computer I mean a Mac.

Compare Vista 64 to Leopard 64 on an 8 GB Mac Pro and see for yourself what I mean. The Mach kernel as implemented by Apple in OS X might have an elegant design, but it is a performance killer - as Mach kernels always are. They have too much communication and synchronization overhead to be really efficient (the symptom for that would be the rotating beach ball, by the way). Just see how poorly multitasking works on OS X compared to Windows. (Admittedly Vista was a step back in this regard, but the situation improved with the service packs.)

The NT kernel also started with a Mach design, but that was changed significantly in later iterations to gain performance.

Furthermore, a lot of the subsystems in the Microsoft world are more optimized than their counterparts in OS X (the TCP/IP stack, for example).

What OS X has going for it is that when the user is experienced and comfortable with the system, it can be much more efficient to use than Windows. It CAN be - it mustn't. Proficient Windows users are usually also not slowed down by the design of their system's user interface. But, to be honest, it's not excuse anyhow to ship a slower performing system to your users.

Guess why Apple is so reluctant to ship drivers for 64-Bit Windows. Apple has complete control over their hardware and software, and yet, surprisingly, a generic retail or systembuilder version of Windows runs so much faster on Apple hardware than Apple's own operating system. If that ain't food for a thought, then I don't know what is.
 
dukebound85 said:
I would like to see that as well. I wonder why they havnt done that in a sense
Click to expand...

The Windows version of The GIMP has not converted anybody to use Linux, and neither have the Windows versions of Firefox or OpenOffice converted anybody to use a free operating system.

And I doubt that the (slow and crappy) Windows version of iTunes or Safari have converted anybody to buy a Mac. If anything at all, then those ports demonstrate how lousy Apple software is.

I also do not think that iWork is as good as you guys pretend it is. Neither is Microsoft Office, just to make that clear. But at least Microsoft Office is the world's business standard, and that is the ultimate killer argument. If you want to be compatible with your peers, then there is NO way around Microsoft Office. And that already ends the discussion.
 
aditghai said:
-Opening Applications especially like word and excel take so much longer on a mac.
Click to expand...

I'm not entirely sure comparing Microsoft apps in Windows vs. OS X is a fair comparison. I believe one of the allegations in the Microsoft antitrust trial was that MS had an unfair competitive edge providing hooks for its own applications in the operating system. I'll leave to someone else's better memory whether the allegation was ever proved. But it does lead me to suspect that if Word on Windows opens faster, how much of that is Windows making the job easier?

A more persuasive test, to me, is how well Windows and Mac versions of Photoshop apply the same effect. It's been years since I've seen a head-to-head matchup, but the Mac usually won.

mt
 
At work, I am of course supplied a Windows PC. Myself and several others have completely switched to using our personal Macbooks instead. The Office thing is the only thing that really annoys me about using a Mac. It is extremely slow to load, but I'm not surprised at all. I've considered office alternatives, but they are just not compatible enough for me to reliably use in an office setting on a daily basis. Unfortunately, we live in an "Office" world and the other alternatives just aren't good enough.

One thing that really annoys me is that many of my coworkers are excel macro nuts. So many of my company's standard spreadsheets contains VBA macros, which don't work on a Mac.

What I normally find myself doing is keeping Windows 7 up in a VM all the time and running office through it instead of office directly on my Mac. Either that or using remote desktop to log into my Windows machine and using office there instead. Luckily, I don't have to use Office on a daily basis, aside from using Outlook/Entourage for email/calendar stuff.

As for general performance of a Windows Machine vs Mac. I don't find one necessarily any faster than the other when they are both new installs. The difference comes in how fast the machines both are after a year or 2 of use. The Mac will probably win (except when it comes to opening Office apps of course).
 
There are many errors in this post. To name a few:
Winni said:
...

Compare Vista 64 to Leopard 64 on an 8 GB Mac Pro ....
Click to expand...
There is no such thing as Leopard 64. Leopard runs on any compatible Mac. If your Mac is 64-bit compatible, then Leopard is 64-bit. It does not require a separate 64-bit version of the OS as in the case of Windows.
Winni said:
The NT kernel also started with a Mach design, but that was changed significantly in later iterations to gain performance.
Click to expand...
Complete and utter nonsense. The lead developer of NT, which is a derivative of OS/2, was the man who developed VMS for the Digital Equipment cooperation. In that sense, the NT kernel is related to VMS and has little in common with Mach.

As for you assertion that Windows multitasks better than MacOS X--again, nonsense. The experience of most Mac users is that their Macs are still responsive with a number of open applications that brings Windows to its knees.
Winni said:
Proficient Windows users are usually also not slowed down by the design of their system's user interface. But, to be honest, it's not excuse anyhow to ship a slower performing system to your users.
Click to expand...
All you are doing now is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are a Windows fanboy.
 
MisterMe said:
The lead developer of NT, which is a derivative of OS/2, was the man who developed VMS for the Digital Equipment cooperation. In that sense, the NT kernel is related to VMS and has little in common with Mach.
Click to expand...
NT is not a derivative of OS/2 (although for a short period of time, before the complete break with IBM, MS was promoting it as vaporware OS/2 3.0 NT, for years in the future. I have an old issue of BYTE Magazine somewhere that showed it.). If NT was a derivative of OS/2, IBM would have had rights to it. Obviously, IBM never had access to any 32-bit OS product from Microsoft, and Microsoft chose not to ship any 32-bit OS/2, although some betas reportedly exist, as well as the IBM OS/2 2.0 PPC beta. IBM did have rights to ship 16-bit Windows, and that is how OS/2 2.0 ran Windows 3.x apps "better than Windows" with the Win-OS/2 layer.

NT is related to Mach (and not OS/2) in the sense that they were both designed as message-passing microkernels. The only similarity to OS/2 is that NT used to have an OS/2 compatibility layer for OS/2 1.x console apps, and many of the APIs in that same category were implemented on NT with similar names/parameters. Everything else was new or an extension of Windows 3.x 16-bit APIs. With NT 4.0, Microsoft started backing off the microkernel junk, by moving video drivers into the kernel. They had previously been run in user-mode (like apps) so they couldn't crash the OS.

All you are doing now is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are a Windows fanboy.
Click to expand...

No, I think he is just pointing out something that is incredibly obvious now that OS X and Windows run on the same hardware: Windows runs circles around OS X in certain areas. This was obvious on the G5/PPC as well: Linux benchmarks(those that worked the OS primitives) would blow away OS X on the same hardware.

OS X is slow. Deal.
 
Amdahl said:
No, I think he is just pointing out something that is incredibly obvious now that OS X and Windows run on the same hardware: Windows runs circles around OS X in certain areas. This was obvious on the G5/PPC as well: Linux benchmarks(those that worked the OS primitives) would blow away OS X on the same hardware.

OS X is slow. Deal.
Click to expand...
Goodness it takes me back when you'd see OS X vs. PowerPC Linux benchmarks on G5 hardware. Poor, poor OS X.
 
Some stuff runs faster on windows, some runs better on OS X, same hardware. I have boot camp on my Octo 2.8 and I can assure you some applications run better on OS X. About beach ball, haven't seen that for a long time with 8gig Ram. Only if an application is about to crash or doing a task which doesn't allow me to use other functions of the app. But a systemwide beachball never happens.
 
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