Leopard system resource usage compared to Tiger

[Krevnik]

Actually, Microsoft is very good at writing highly efficient tools and operating systems. The difference is they have to deal with hardware and software products from thousands of vendors. Making allowances for all those products leads to bloated code.

In contrast, Apple Computer controls their hardware design. Although they don't have huge staffing like Microsoft, the smaller amount of hardware models allows Apple to make incremental changes to their UNIX-based OS.

It is definitely more about the software vendors than the hardware vendors. Microsoft has a tendency to make the OEMs adjust to Microsoft's changes (see how Vista broke hibernation on a selection of laptop models until the OEM updated their drivers, for example).

However, Microsoft tends to bend over backwards on APIs and other developer-oriented decisions that makes for bloated code (back compat is a PITA to begin with). Apple on the other hand, is perfectly willing to give developers the finger and break them if it is 'better design' to deprecate or eliminate an API, and will let the dev twist in the wind, even Adobe.

 

[gnasher729]

Actually, Microsoft is very good at writing highly efficient tools and operating systems. The difference is they have to deal with hardware and software products from thousands of vendors. Making allowances for all those products leads to bloated code.

In contrast, Apple Computer controls their hardware design. Although they don't have huge staffing like Microsoft, the smaller amount of hardware models allows Apple to make incremental changes to their UNIX-based OS.

As a point where I'd like to contradict you: Graphics cards. For Microsoft Vista, Microsoft came up with DX 10, and with a completely new driver model, making it necessary to make substantial changes to every graphics driver, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the DX 10 features that you would read about. This was very little work for Microsoft. It was very, very substantial work for every manufacturer of graphics cards. What is worse, the DX 10 features, which is what users actually want, don't run on Windows XP, so adding extra features and doing lots of work in the driver doesn't actually get the manufacturer many more customers.

And now Microsoft released the DX 10.1 spec, which requires changes to the floating-point arithmetic used in every card. And that is something you just can't change with driver changes; that DX 10 compatible card that you just bought is 99% sure incapable of ever running DX 10.1. How much work for Microsoft? Nothing at all. How much work for the graphics card manufacturer? Create a new card, needing more transistors, so it is either more expensive at same speed or slower at the same price.

Apple, on the other hand, just wants an industry standard OpenGL driver.