~0.5 seconds on my $1095 Core i5-450M, 160GB Intel G2 SSD, 6GB RAM, 1GB ATI 5650 HP Envy 14
I would not complain if I were seeing 0.5 or even 5 seconds. On my IT mismangled machine, nothing happens in 0.5 seconds. I should also note that back in the day, when I did my own IT on Win XP at home, it was never as slow as what I deal with around here every day. Still, I don't think I've ever experienced a Windows environment where I could preview files in 0.5 seconds. I would imagine the 6 gig of RAM helps. I don't own a single machine with that much RAM. I've asked for more RAM here but as my machine is due to be replaced in a few months, it would probably take longer to get the extra RAM than to simply wait for the new box.
The time that is stolen from my productivity every day is astounding. Several minutes to get email open, even if I walk away for coffee and come back I sit a long time after clicking to refresh my inbox. This isn't just a Windows thing. I'm not at all happy with Apple Mail either. It's just that on my Windows box, I have the additional aggravation of frequent "freezes" while I'm waiting for my inbox to open. And by freezes, I mean the entire OS is frozen, and I'm unable to even hit ctrl-alt-delete to bring up the task manager. Start up and shut down to and from
standby are astoundingly slow. It's like Windows is a spoiled toddler who doesn't want to go to sleep when told. I often toss my notebook in its bag in disgust listening to chirps and beeps while I walk to my car and quite often I'm all the way down the elevator to the first floor by the time the darn thing is groggy enough to fall asleep. Then there is the aforementioned lack of a credible QuickLook. Office 2007 is good for a 90 second delay every time I launch any of its applications. I cannot even preview a document without a prolonged freeze. Acrobat is a horribly slow memory hog that sits there hemorrhaging memory while I'm working on other things. If I want to open a PDF at home, I can see it at full resolution in less time than it takes to hear the mouse click. That's faster than the speed of sound. If I want to be able to edit it, a double click gets it open in Preview in about 0.5 seconds. At this point I have over 50% of the capabilities I would have inside Adobe Acrobat Editor in windows. Then there's McAffee enterprise, with all it's scan settings greyed out by our administrator, humming away scanning documents I created 15 minutes ago.
Remember Apple's last "Vista" ad, "Trust Me"? I often think of that when I suffer through this BS on my work-issued XP box even though most of the issues I experience are caused by our IT department and badly written third party apps. The best advertising Apple ever got was created by all these companies clinging to 10 year old software and treating users like our time is not valuable. But I also think of it when I'm over at a friend's house and they ask me for help with a Win 7 problem and I see the same old dialogs I got sick of years ago. The code base from Windows NT 3.51 lives on in Windows 7. The same annoyances that bother me at the office are one or two clicks away in 7 (which is really Windows NT 7. Vista was 6, or is that pronounced sick?) Apple swallowed a bitter pill a decade ago when they turned their back on decades of spaghetti code and adopted a Unix based OS. Microsoft has yet to even think about such a thing. I open system profiler on my low end Mac computer about 3 times a year. I open task manager to try to figure out what Windows thinks it's doing about 3 times an hour. Like I said, I'll come along later and update my findings once we come out from under XP SP3 but there are those in this thread who claim old windows boxes run "just fine" and I have experience that leads me to believe this is not true.
I have a Macbook with 2gig of RAM and several Mac Minis with 1 gig of RAM apiece. I almost never find myself running for system profiler (OS X equivalent of task manager). Unix likes to keep its swap on a dedicated partition. This is very important to operating system stability. On a windows box, hyberfile.sys and pagefile.sys are on the boot drive. Everything is on the boot partition. When the boot partition fills up, you are all done, often unable to even move the mouse. On a Mac, when the boot partition fills up, the only way I would notice it is if I go to save a large file and it fails. Then I can go free up some space and save the file. No trip to the hardware power switch or "safe mode" required.
Have I ever seen a kernel panic? Yes. Have I ever reset one of my Macs? Yes. I've even reinstalled OS X a few times. But reinstalling OS X is a simple matter of inserting the DVD and picking "archive and install". No settings to replicate. No passwords or accounts to re-create. No freakin' crap-shoot plug and play to sit through. Just a few minutes and all is fresh and clean like the day I picked it up in the store WITH all my files and settings. Oh, and by the way. All the Finder windows I had open are still open after the install. The first time I saw this I was floored. I remember spending hours and hours sweating with windows installs on home built boxes and used HP's and Dells and this was fully automatic.
From surface level features like QuickLook, to underlying features like cron jobs to clean out cruft, to behind the scenes features like easy upgrades and installs, to fewer dialog boxes about stuff I don't need to know or care about, it all adds up. I would estimate that I have saved over 200 hours of (drivers, network failure, virus definition update, cd key number, inability to print, and just plain clicking OK) fuss since going from 4 windows (XP) boxes to 4 Macs. That's way more than half a second.
