Mac OS X 10.4.7 to deliver audio fixes, more - Page 2

Yep, in Carbon. It was later completely rewritten in Cocoa. (3.0?)

Not only that, it doesn't do half (a quarter?) of the things that OS X does *at any given moment*. OS X is doing an insane amount of work under the covers, when compared to OS9. Not wasted inefficiency, useful work.

I've been a Machead since '84, and I can't imagine going back to OS9 now. No way, no how.

In rebuttal I just have to concur that YES Mac OS X is doing far more than 9. And yes, in comparison it may be pointless. Features wise. However, you missed the point there...

I was merely stating that moving through-out the OS and doing simple tasks even as simple as loading an app or clicking on a drop-down menu in any Adobe product was incredibly faster in 9 than it is now... or has been in any version of 10. And given the level of enhancements to 10 Apple could have addresses this issue. Its a point of much frustration on a daily basis.

And your judging speed increases from one version of 10 to another. But all of which are not leaps and bounds faster than 9 was. In fact none have been faster. Just inches forward in speed from one bloated version of 10 to the next.

When will you techies learn that PERCEPTION matters more than fact. It does not matter a whit if OS X is doing 400 things in the background if the user is constantly waiting for the spinning beachball of death or for applications to come to the front or for web pages to load as fast as they do in IE for Winblows.

AND dont' forget that most Mac users, even today, only do one thing at a time. They still use their Mac as they did in OS 9, one thing at a time. I know it is nonsensical, but people are creatures of habit. Thus, for them, Photoshop is much slower in OS X than in OS 9.

Perception matters. And it matters more than technical nitpicking.

Ahh, so the mythical 'Teh Snappy' has reared it's head. People miss Teh Snappy.

Funny how the only apps given as an example of "TEH SLOW" are from Adobe.

Maybe, just MAYBE, that's because the code in most Adobe apps has huge amounts of cruft/legacy shit in it, not to mention cross-platform bridging overhead that shouldn't be there?

Exactly.

Who still wants collaborative multitasking?


Only 92 for me (sorry, too young! ), but I agree. Yes, I miss some Usability from OS 9, but I certainly wouldn't want to go back. Ever.

Even if they have an instant messenger open, that's already another thing. E-mail client? Third thing. Browser? Fourth. Finder windows? Fifth.

One thing at a time? I don't see it happening, and I do do tech support for many newbies.

Nope, Safari is slower than IE on whinedows.

Word is slower than word 98 on OS 9.
So is Excel.

Teh snappy has never left.

What bearing does that have on anything?


And Apple has what to do with this? These are third-party apps. Who says Word 2004 is written as efficiently as Word 98?

You might have more programs open at a time, generally it is using only one of those programs in use at any given second. I doubt many people are reading emails while writing and IM while browsing the web in any given second. But that doesn't mean I will touch OS9. My Powermac was supposed to include the Classic compatibility install CD, but I haven't bothered with getting it.

At which point multitasking is required.

Now, in OS 9 days of collaborative multitasking, this effectively meant "frontmost app gets 90% of the resources; rest gets the remainder". This may fit your usage profile, e.g. when in Photoshop, you want to fully concentrate on image editing anyway, and nothing else matters as much. But it's not as practical as it may sound.

In OS X, instead, resources get allocated centrally, and each application only gets as much as the kernel thinks it deserves. That may result in delays at time, but overall causes a fairer compromise.


Obviously not; that's not the point. Multitasking happens regardless of whether you actually use the apps or not. When the processes are open, they take up CPU time, no matter how little.

Chucker gives the best clue to the problem. OS 9 relegated out-of-focus apps to get only a tiny portion of the CPU.

OS X attempts to gauge what each app needs based on multiple criteria and responds willingly to requests from the apps themselves for more cycles and RAM. This is a good thing, like Chucker says, but it also means that the user can't control what gets the most power from the computer.

Effectively, OS 9 allowed the user to subjugate apps at their whim, not the whim of the OS or the app. If your mail app wanted to check mail in OS 9, it would ask for the system resources necessary and would get them based on being frontmost or not. IF that meant getting one cycle out of ten thousand, that's what it got. And it still managed to check email.

Now, OS X might give your mail app 1 cycle out of 1000 or 100, because of the way it manages itself. That means the frontmost app loses cycles, and can be a real pain if there are several apps trying to do this, along with all the unixy goodness that is always running.

All I'm saying is that teh snappy matters, no matter what. The technical defenses that others are raising regarding the why's and the justifications for the OS X model are true, but the effect is still a slower-responding computer for some users.

Perception matters.

Additionally, the amount of available RAM, the number of processors, and free hard disk space all play into this. The more, the better the response.

Yes, perception does matter.

But even if it's true (it probably is) that, when compared directly and under fair comparison, OS X generally feels slower than OS 9, then you still have to take into account that OS X is significantly more complex, much of which is to the user's benefit, regardless of what they do (more stability! many, many more networking features! etc.), and perhaps more importantly, sold Macs no matter at what end (low-end, mid-end, high-end) goto an order of a magnitude faster.

We're talking about a gap of about 7 years here, folks. OS 9 was in the late days of G3s or in the early days of G4s. $2000 bought you a few hundred Megahertz, with one CPU, as a desktop. Now? It buys you two *thousand* Megahertz, with *two* CPU cores, several times the RAM, and generally much faster I/O and everything, in a *portable*.

You may still not like this. Maybe you still want your crusty old G3/300 mini tower to run Tiger fast. Well, I can't sympathize with that. It's called progress. Evolution. You gotta make sacrifices or you'll always stand still.

Fair enough: OS X won't be fun on a machine that's four or more years old. It wasn't intended for that either. Such is life.

And there's the biggest reason for not moving back to the sort of model that OS9 used... scalability. (Well, and robustness, reliability, stability... but we'll ignore those for now.)

With OS9, a second processor had to be coded for in every application. It didn't matter how much RAM you had, if you didn't manually bump up the amount the OS was supposed to give it, you couldn't use it.

OS X takes care of all of that for you, automagically.

*THAT* is the perception I care about: can I concentrate on my work, and not have to fiddle with the &*%(#@$ computer all the time just to run my apps?

Whether a *particular* action takes .1sec longer to do or not is irrelevant, if it saves me having to do the quit-app-to-free-up-RAM-to-launch-another-app-then-repeat mambo that OS9 required me to do. I frequently have a dozen apps running happily in my 512MB of RAM, and I never have to worry about out of memory messages, or lack of resources - it just works. I never could have done that in OS9, and it radically changed my workflow possibilities. I'm now nimble, instead of plodding, precisely because of the 'technical defenses' that many are so quick to put down.

True speed, perceived or not, isn't about whether you wait a split second longer here or there, it's about what you can get done by the end of the day. In that regard, OS X is lightyears ahead of OS9. If I perceive that I get more done in a day, then the little delays here and there are inconsequential to my workflow.

Nobody here has ever claimed that OS X is faster than OS9, I'm not sure where you came up with that, BeAtMaKeR. OS9 was certainly faster on the same hardware, for performing specific tasks in applications already in the foreground, than OS X. The point that Chucker was making, that I think you missed, is that every iteration of OS X has gotten *faster*, not slower, as you claimed. 10.0 was the slowest, 10.4 is the fastest of the OS X run. Adding more features *while* making it faster? Brilliant.

However - the evening out of the computation landscape between apps in OS X, means that working with multiple apps at once is much, MUCH smoother and slicker. I can't think of anyone I know offhand, pro, newbie, or in between, that doesn't run many apps at once in OS X, and bounce between them at will. Couldn't do that in OS9. At the end of the day, the only speedup that matters is what you were able to get done.

Originally posted by Kickaha
...The evening out of the computation landscape between apps in OS X, means that working with multiple apps at once is much, MUCH smoother and slicker. I can't think of anyone I know offhand, pro, newbie, or in between, that doesn't run many apps at once in OS X, and bounce between them at will. Couldn't do that in OS9. At the end of the day, the only speedup that matters is what you were able to get done.


This was where I was gonna jump in on. Yes, on windows I like browsing the web with firefox on my AMD64 2.15ghz 1gb RAM machine. Teh Snaptastic. Adobe Reader also fires up almost instantaneously. Specific tasks in Windows, assuming you don't have rubbish clutter in the background, makes WinXP seem faster than Macs.

BUT there's something to working in OS 10.4.x where, although little bits and pieces here and there seem slow, there is an indelible "flow" to things. Hard to describe. On my iBook g4 933mhz 640mb ram 5400rpm drive, I can switch between two users with a few apps open on each, run some apps here and there, I think there is a workflow that well, flows... It's almost as if there is a zen-like connection with the OS on 10.4.x where you sort of moderate your pace yet you're still productive. This is all wishy-washy to the hardcore techies, but for the end user, this is the BIG appeal of the Mac. The FLOW of things, using the OS isn't a chore or an uncontrollable thrill, it's a mildly pleasant experience. Which unlike Windows, which deteriorates over time (unless you have super-admins like Chucker), the Mac experience remains pleasant and grows on you as you discover new hidden features. Like it's Christmas every week..........

That said though, my iBook g4 933mhz 640mb ram is going to be 3 years old in November. If I had a strong improvement in my mental state and was able to return to regular web design (Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop), I think I would be frustrated with my iBook. However a PowerBook 1.5ghz 5400rpm drive 1gb ram, that would be a good FLOW to things, i think.

Right now I think PowerBooks 1.5 and 1.67ghz are being gobbled up quite well on eBay and such. They offer the best value-for-money (assuming warranty normal/extended still applies) for Adobe/Macromedia casual/pro users. Because 1. No Rosetta, 2. Cheaper than brand new MacBook/ MacBookPro.

I'm gonna bust some apologists balloons now.

I just installed Vista beta 2 on my iMac dual core. It runs Aero just fine. The AI thread about my iMac Vista install.


It is much, much snappier than OS X. File window operations are instant. Window dragging is accurate and instant. No delays.

Again, I love OS X. My complaints are simply based on what I know the OS ought to be able to do. The Vista BETA 2 install helps prove this.

Sorry guys, but if MSFT's latest and greatest shows off teh snappy, OS X should have been able to do so for the last 3-4 years.

Apple, speed up the perceived speed of the OS. Now.

I would definitely like a faster OS, and hope that Apple improves theirs. To go with Windows as my main system, I'd want to be sure that the maintainability is there, so I'd need to give it time to see if that is any good. One crude test to try is to install a bunch of programs, emails and other personal data, reinstall Vista and see if you need to reinstall most of your software and data or not.

Originally posted by JeffDM
To go with Windows as my main system...

Are you sure you want to do that? With Vista 1.0??

Outside of window resizing (I'm assuming you mean window resizing because windows dragging has always been more than instant in OS X...even on my old 266MHz Beige G3) what are the other perceived slowness in OS X? What do you mean by 'file window operations'? I've never felt like OS X was slow except on window resizing...this on a 2x800 with 640MB RAM. I can't imagine that a Core Duo Mac would be anything but lightning fast.

Maybe there's something wrong with your system? Just a thought.

10.4.7. tonight

I hope so!

Bring it on

Does anyone know if Quartz 2D Extreme will ever be supported? I turned it on by editing the /Library/Preferences/windowserver.plist but I cant figure out what it does \. It sounds nifty from all the reviews though .

It starts holy wars on AI.com. That is exactly what Q2DE does.

Heh. I forgot about Quartz 2D Extreme. Whatever

I fooled around with an iMac Core Duo 1.83ghz today briefly. It was teh snapptastic. You people with Intel Macs have ZERO argument about things being any more snappy. ZERO.

MInus a few rosetta apps. I am very pleased with my both my Duo's.

I'd like to see Adobe get off its A$$ and get us some universal binary flash plugins for Safari. I hate having to use it in Rosetta. What's the matter with those folks? Punching one character an hour for their code?

Er... All Intel Macs come with an Intel-native flash plugin.

For some reason it isn't downloadable from Adobe. So, if you've updated your flash, you've over-written the Intel-native flash with a PPC only flash. The Intel native version can be re-installed from your Apple Software Restore DVDs.

Mr. H, how might one go about doing that (because that's precisely what happened) without reinstalling the entire OS from the software restore CDs?

1. Download and install pacifist.

2. Insert Apple's "Mac OS X Install Disk 1" that came with your computer.

3. Launch pacifist and click on "open package"

4. Navigate to the folder "system" on the DVD.

5. There should be two folders inside, one labeled "installation", the other labeled "library". Select "installation", then "packages".

6. Select "Essentials.pkg".

7. In the list that appears, using the disclosure arrows, expand "Library" and then "Internet Plug-Ins".

8. Select (highlight) "Flash Player.plugin", then click the "install" button in the toolbar.

Mr. H, Thank you for taking the time to help me with my Flash problem. Your instructions worked and I now can run Safari without Rosetta. I appreciate it.