This is my second entry in the “Mac OS X Diaries,” some daily notes on my experiments with Apple’s new operating system. There are two things to keep in mind. One: I’m running Mac OS X on a Power Mac G4 dual processor (450 MHz) system that’s a standard configuration except for an extra 128 MB of RAM (for a total of 256). Two: I’m not using OS X as my main operating system yet.
Today we’ll look at how fast Mac OS X runs. All the figures you’re about to see were timed, but certainly cannot be considered scientific — here’s what I found.
On a restart, it took Mac OS X approximately 80 seconds to boot, as compared to 83 seconds for Mac OS 9.1. When I launched the Classic environment (the environment for running legacy, non-Carbonized applications) it took 53 seconds.
I also timed the Carbon/Cocoa apps that come with Mac OS X. The QuickTime Player, Address Book, AppleScript Editor, Calculator, Clock, Preview, Image Capture, Mail, Sherlock, Stickies, TextEdit, and just about all the utilities (Apple System Profiler, Disk Copy, Grab, etc.) all snapped open in under five seconds. StuffIt Expander, Internet Explorer, iTunes, iMovie 2, and the snazzy-looking Chess game took about seven seconds to launch.
These times may be a second or two slower than it would take their equivalents to open under Mac OS 9.1, but for all practical purposes (to me anyway) I don’t see a performance hit, at least in the OS X “native” environment. Even the Classic environment’s performance is much smoother than expected. For instance, Word opened up in about five seconds.
Please note that I haven’t used any of the firmware updates posted by Apple over the weekend. Several Mac users have reported major headaches with some of the updates. So far I haven’t found any good reason to give any of them a try. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.