Bit of a silly test as for the price of a Macbook Pro running OSX you could have a Win7 laptop with a much quicker CPU and GPU, and more RAM. All of which would make the Win7 machine a lot quicker than the Mac for the same amount of cold, hard cash.
And that's all that really matters.
No no, you are very much mistaken. What really matters is your happiness. If it makes you happy to work on a windows PC, and it makes you happy that you spent less money on your initial purchase, then you'd be stupid to buy a Mac. And vice versa. A lot of people pay willingly for the experience of their choice. Not just in computing, but in every walk of life.
By your quote Win7 shouldn't run faster on anything then... Because Win7 is designed for PC's and all intel mac's are also PC's. Or did I miss something.
Yeah you missed something. Windows is never going to have as faster boot time as a mac as it needs to contain support for huge combinations of hardware. But in comparison macs only need very limited support as Apple has dictated what goes into every mac. At the very least the mac will always have an advantage of a driver db that is microscopic in comparison.
Another example of this I have seen is with more experimental os's that don't have any boot time due to the fact the hardware has been fixed removing the need for any scan.
Windows Update worked for %30 of my software and took forever. Because of the instability one had to update by parts, restart numerous times, and every week there was a freaking update. Factor into that the other 70% of software which had their own separate updates, each happening very often and you have a situation where you spend a considerable time every day updating and restarting.
With a Mac all of that is gone. Updating works for 80% of my software (because Apple has the best in class in what I need almost always), it happens completely in the background and only occasionally (a few times a year) asks you to restart, which takes 1 minute.
So one has a situation where you spend a couple of hours a week on one OS and a couple of hour a YEAR with the other OS.
That to me is a deal-breaker.
I have the complete opposite experiance. I have an iMac running vista, the vista half largely sorts itself out and will download all the updates in the background. Then when I shut down I get the option to install them then or just leave it (I have noticed though if I leave the machine turned on a lot of them appear to just get installed on their own). In contrast though on the mac half every time there's an update software update flashs up on the screen with it's icon bouncing away trying to stop what your doing. You then either stop what your doing and install the update or close it. Problem with this though is unless you remember to open software update and install the update os x will just let you turn the machine off with no reminder. Then next time you start working you get another prompt which you then cancel and it all repeats.
My issue here is while all the windows updates can happen when you turn the machine off and largely not affect you, with osx I either sit and wait to use my computer again or have to remember to install updates myself.
- The vast majority of people can't afford the good stuff and will pay for el-cheapo piece of crap product and then either deal with it in a mature way (c'est la vie...) or go into denial and think their piece of crap product is as good as the more expensive stuff.
- The few will have the money to afford the good stuff. They buy it and they immediately realize why it costs more and they become glad they paid more because it is so much much much better.
The ironic twist of this story is that Macs may have a slightly higher upfront fee, but over time you pay less because the system depreciate less and requires way less maintenance $$ and software $$.
Or you're left with a dead PC after one year when the video card (botched NVIDIA) dies and the manufacturer couldn't care less. This has happened to several people I know. Also had a friend whose PC laptop screen died under warranty and the manufacturer refused to replace it because they said it was "impact damage" implying user mistreatment despite no obvious impact or mark on the case. It wasn't impacted, I was there when it died. It died because it had cheap-arse componants that have a high failure rate. I would have taken it further but my friend gave up and bought another cheap PC that will probably only last another year.
There are companies that exist solely to peddle cheap rubbish and encourage a high-turnover. They couldn't care less about their reputation, as long as they sell the cheapest hardware they will still be successful and with a non-existant customer service, stiill profitablt. Apple is not one such company and it owes it's present success largely to it's reputation for building quality products.
We live in such a throwaway society that even computers now have because cheap accessories that need to be upgraded with the season. I for one am happy I am not contributing unnecessarilly to mountains of eWaste because I buy a computer that is built to last.
Quote:
Originally Posted by buceta
The ironic twist of this story is that Macs may have a slightly higher upfront fee, but over time you pay less because the system depreciate less and requires way less maintenance $$ and software $$.
They're not optimized drivers. In fact, they're frequently broken (eg, using the microphone port on a MacBook Pro doesn't work in Vista or 7) or very old (like the packaged Nvidia drivers). On my MBP I've had to hack in more modern drivers, and got noticable speed gains out of it.
Can you tell us which drivers you've had to update to get the best performance?
When both Mac OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 were tested on a MacBook Pro, Apple's new operating system clearly beat Microsoft in terms of speed, a new test has shown.
Both operating systems were tested on a 2008 MacBook Pro machine by CNet,
from Apple.com Bootcamp support page:
"Important: Boot Camp supports only Microsoft Windows Home Edition and Professional with SP2 or later, and Microsoft Vista. The required Macintosh-specific drivers provided by Apple are only intended for these releases."
so the test is bullshit, it is unsupported firmware/drivers/software
Quote:
The Mac software also unsurprisingly ran Apple's own native applications more efficiently. Converting a movie from M4 format to iPod in Quicktime X on Snow Leopard took 444.3 seconds, while Windows 7, with QuickTime 7 (the latest version available) took 723 seconds. Similarly, converting 17 songs in iTunes from MP3 to AAC took 149.9 seconds in Snow Leopard, while Windows 7 required 162 seconds.
Apple software is optimized for the apple OS, no shit Sherlock! run the test using Adobe compression tools, Avid, or some 3rd party cross platform tool and get back to me.
Quote:
The test also found that Mac OS X 10.6 had better battery life on the MacBook Pro than Windows 7. The 2008 model has a removable battery. But author Dong Ngo said he believes Boot Camp drivers were mostly responsible for the Windows 7 battery life, as many PC laptops fared much better than the 77 minutes the Microsoft OS fared.
at least they touched on the fact that they were running it on a macbook...for Gods sake, I have 7 on a 4 year old laptop at work to determine a hardware baseline, and it gets like 3 hrs on a 4 year old battery.
OSX is definitely better than 7 outside of large managed enviornments, but hey, Windows is a lot better than these clowns make it look...I would expect this kind of yellow journaliosum from Macworld, but not from a PC centric publication like C|NET
When both Mac OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 were tested on a MacBook Pro, Apple's new operating system clearly beat Microsoft in terms of speed, a new test has shown.
Both operating systems were tested on a 2008 MacBook Pro machine by CNet, and each was given its own, separate, clean hard drive. The 64-bit version of each OS was included in the test, which measured a variety of speed and performance related tasks. Snow Leopard was given true, full 64-bit support with most of its native applications taking full advantage of modern processors.
Each OS had the same software installed: iTunes 9, QuickTime, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Cinebench R10. In the test, Snow Leopard booted and shut down significantly faster than Windows 7.
"In time-based tests, Snow Leopard consistently outdid Windows 7," the study found. "It took only 36.4 seconds to boot up, while Windows took 42.7 seconds. In a shutdown test, Snow Leopard took only 6.6 seconds, while Windows needed twice the amount of time: 12.6 seconds. Both computers, however, took just about 1 second to return from sleeping. For this reason, I didn't actually test the wake-up time as it was too short in both operating systems to produce meaningful numbers or even allow me to measure the difference."
The Mac software also unsurprisingly ran Apple's own native applications more efficiently. Converting a movie from M4 format to iPod in Quicktime X on Snow Leopard took 444.3 seconds, while Windows 7, with QuickTime 7 (the latest version available) took 723 seconds. Similarly, converting 17 songs in iTunes from MP3 to AAC took 149.9 seconds in Snow Leopard, while Windows 7 required 162 seconds.
The test also found that Mac OS X 10.6 had better battery life on the MacBook Pro than Windows 7. The 2008 model has a removable battery. But author Dong Ngo said he believes Boot Camp drivers were mostly responsible for the Windows 7 battery life, as many PC laptops fared much better than the 77 minutes the Microsoft OS fared.
One area where Windows 7 was able to easily trump Snow Leopard was in graphics performance. The system's 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics card helped the system score much better in the latest version of Windows, earning a 5,777 3D rendering score in Cinebench R10. Snow Leopard scored 5,437.
In testing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Windows 7 again came out on top, with an average 26.3 frames per second performance, compared to 21.2 frames per second within Snow Leopard.
Ngo's conclusion: Unless you are a gamer, get a Mac.
"If you can get by with just software designed by Apple and if money is not a big issue, you will be happy with a Mac," he said. "Examples of these software choices are iTunes, iLife, QuickTime, Safari, iChat, and so on (and you probably won't need much more than those for daily entertainment and communication needs). Finally, if money is not an issue--and it definitely is for most of us--you should get a Mac anyway. It's the only platform, for now, that can run both Windows and OS X."
Anyone with common sense can see this is biased. How about comparing Office versions?
Would be nice to see Adobe products comparison, too.
But it is completely irrelevant, IMHO.
Those "testers" forgot simple thing - for the price of MacBook or iMac units, PC users can get systems with Windows 7 that will utterly dominate - and still save some money.
So even if OSX is better optimized for hardware it is supposed to run with (which is hardly a surprise), bang-for-the-buck is definitely on the PC size.
Quad core Macs could level that a bit, if they come out.
Apple provides drivers for Windows 7. They are included in Snow Leopard DVD.
Drivers that come with Windows installation CD/DVD are by default not performing as good as fresh drivers downloaded from manufacturers' web sites. This in particular works for graphics drivers, but for others as well even if not to the same extend.
There is no conspiracy there - OS CD/DVD image has "locked" drivers from some point back in time, as it is really hard to update that image whenever new drivers are released. They are included to provide initial functionality, but it is up to user to grab latest drivers if he/she wants to squeeze better performance from computer.
So the question here is how good are W7 drivers included with OSX are? I'd be really surprised if they are latest and greatest.
Well how do you know if machine is tested with basic drivers supplied with OSX or tester went an extra mile downloading fresh drivers from Intel, Nvidia, Realtek...?
Additionally, Apple did great job by securing latest hardware from Intel for that generation's MacBook; if I recall well, it was one of the fastest (if not the fastest) notebook on the market hardware wise, regardless OS installed.
But as other manufacturers got hold of same technology (and kept improving on it faster than Apple), you can find at the end of the article that (quote): Correction: The MacBook Pro's reign as fastest notebook ended on 10/25/2007, not 11/23/2007 as was previously reported. We apologize for the error.
I don't know what kind of magic is involved, but Windows 7 boots faster on my iMac compared to friends Dell.
2 Ghz C2D vs 3.06 Ghz C2D
4GB RAM vs 4GB RAM
1TB Hitachi vs 1TB WD
Go figure.
It is not too hard to figure, if you are really interested to.
Each software you install on computer - if it runs in the background - will add a bit to boot-up time. Antivirus, firewall, latest (usually bigger) drivers.
My Creative X-Fi audio card came with huge driver/apps package, and while it doesn't load everything on the startup, it did add a few seconds to my boot time compared to integrated Realtek audio.
Do you have exactly same hardware and software on both computers..?
i'm a bit puzzled why windows is able to perform graphics operations significantly better.
Because there is strong competition between Graphics cards manufacturers in PC segment and everyone is trying to squeeze last atom of optimization from their respective hardware. Graphics card drivers are being updated monthly, and while one really doesn't have to install every update, doing it 2-3 times a year will give better results in games and other graphics-intensive apps, specially with lower-end graphics.
High end graphics might have enough muscle in reserve not to be so dependable of drivers' optimization; if your card is giving you 80fps in a specific game, you don't really care if it could give you 120fps as you are not going to notice it anyway.
Additionally, Microsoft did good job with maturing DirectX over the last decade. OpenGL - when it comes to desktop applications - was left behind time ago.
Macs come with preinstalled graphics and choice is limited, such is volume of chips moved. I think those two factors are de-stimulating hardware manufacturers to invest too much time and effort in optimizing drivers for Macs. And considering that Macs are traditionally not gaming machines, having drivers good enough rather than best possible, is, well... good enough?
Has it ever been tried? Create a PC with high end, high price components that would cause that PC to be $2000.00? Can PC's plastic case handle the heat??
You'd be surprised - much better than any iMac, whatever they are made of
I actually had task manager opened and was looking at MSSE (MS Security Essentials, actually) while opening files, starting programs, checking email, installing Batman: Arkham Asylum (big game).
I failed to see MSSE creating any visible load on CPU. It has to, but it seems to be so low on resources and time intervals it fails to register in task manager.
Crappy article... Couldn't this have just as easily been titlted "Apple software runs slower under windows"? They really should have tested more non-apple software. Especially something modern and available in 64-bit on both, Lightroom comes to mind. for example.tOt would have been good to also see something like Photoshop which is 64-bit on Windows but 32-bit on Mac. I look forward to someone doing a proper and thourough review.
Photoshop was actually benchmarked some time ago, though on Vista 64 and Leopard (not 7 and SL) both clean-installed on MacBook Pro. Conclusion, if I remember correctly, was that PS on Leopard was a bit faster while processing smaller files, while large files did better on Vista. On average, they were pretty much the same.
Even if this was compared with a comparable HP system with a Macbook and Windows 7 edged OSX SL that still would be bad.
Tack on anti-virus and anti-malware software and you'll lose anywhere between 5 to 20% of your system performance. Then over time your registry becomes bloated and slows down lookups that all apps do and so on. Whatever edge Windows 7 had at the beginning is soon gone after a month of use.
On new quad core AV takes much, much less. Probably bellow 1% (my experience at least).
Registry bloating is over-exaggerated, as most Windows "problems" are observed here. With all the games, freeware, shareware... going through my PC, my load times or responsiveness in a year time does not change enough to be noticeable (I will run registry cleaner approximately once a year, by habit). For less demanding users, registry will not cause performance problem within the life of computer, old-fashioned as it is.
It's interesting how you sugarcoat the reality of Windows maintenance. I do it everyday and my job requires setting up windows machines for corporate and personal use.
Here's what you "conveniently" failed to mention in your points:
1) Windows Update does update everything it can. Unfortunately, it requires multiple restarts, multiple updating, and then those updates after restart requires even more updates to the updates it just applied. Then, any 3rd party add-ons and plugins need to be updated. Depending on the release-date of the install, it takes literally hours to get a windows PC fully patched and updated. Hours of lost productivity.
2) The Disk Defragmenter included with Windows is a crippled version of Executive Software's Diskeeper. It is useless and does little to address the problem. On corporate and personal levels, I install the full-version of Diskeeper and recommend to personal users to also purchase and install it. There are freeware version that holds promise that I've been testing called Defraggler from Piriform: http://www.piriform.com/defraggler . In addtion, I use another freeware product from Piriform called CCleaner http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner to keep the registry in check and remove all wasted disk space. It also has an excellent program uninstaller which does a better job of removing unwanted programs compared to the regular windows-supplied add/remove programs option. The sad part is that I have to seek 3rd party solutions since Microsoft does not provide for it or includes a crippled version of it for whatever reason. It's a sad state when I have to clean up registries that are so easily corrupted again impeding performance. Microsoft fails big-time in this area.
AntiVirus is a necessity for Windows folks. I personally don't use it on my personal windows machines since the performance hit of every vendor (including Microsoft's new - and free - AV solution) is just too much to accept. Is it any wonder why a Window's machine requires twice the horsepower just to keep all the necessary maintenance systems running? It's a joke.
So the point of my response to you is that Windows requires a ridiculous amount of handholding just to keep the system humming. My machines run great as I have the knowledge and knowhow to do it. But for the 99% of regular folk, it is a lesson in futility. Even when I get someone's machine running perfectly, in a month it will be back to some level of problem as windows does not do a good job to fend for itself.
If you really think that what is provided within Windows is adequate to keep a system running smoothly, I recommend to you that you don't quit YOUR day job. You probably have a very low standard of how a PC should run. Productivity takes a back seat in that case soon enough.
On the Apple systems I work on they take care of themselves right out of the box. Within 15 minutes, they are ready to go and be put to use. And in most cases, I never have to touch them again.
This is from years of experience on BOTH systems and it is my day job.
I figured out your opinion is extremely biased right at "Is it any wonder why a Window's machine requires twice the horsepower just to keep all the necessary maintenance systems running?"
Comments
Bit of a silly test as for the price of a Macbook Pro running OSX you could have a Win7 laptop with a much quicker CPU and GPU, and more RAM. All of which would make the Win7 machine a lot quicker than the Mac for the same amount of cold, hard cash.
And that's all that really matters.
No no, you are very much mistaken. What really matters is your happiness. If it makes you happy to work on a windows PC, and it makes you happy that you spent less money on your initial purchase, then you'd be stupid to buy a Mac. And vice versa. A lot of people pay willingly for the experience of their choice. Not just in computing, but in every walk of life.
By your quote Win7 shouldn't run faster on anything then... Because Win7 is designed for PC's and all intel mac's are also PC's. Or did I miss something.
Yeah you missed something. Windows is never going to have as faster boot time as a mac as it needs to contain support for huge combinations of hardware. But in comparison macs only need very limited support as Apple has dictated what goes into every mac. At the very least the mac will always have an advantage of a driver db that is microscopic in comparison.
Another example of this I have seen is with more experimental os's that don't have any boot time due to the fact the hardware has been fixed removing the need for any scan.
Windows Update worked for %30 of my software and took forever. Because of the instability one had to update by parts, restart numerous times, and every week there was a freaking update. Factor into that the other 70% of software which had their own separate updates, each happening very often and you have a situation where you spend a considerable time every day updating and restarting.
With a Mac all of that is gone. Updating works for 80% of my software (because Apple has the best in class in what I need almost always), it happens completely in the background and only occasionally (a few times a year) asks you to restart, which takes 1 minute.
So one has a situation where you spend a couple of hours a week on one OS and a couple of hour a YEAR with the other OS.
That to me is a deal-breaker.
I have the complete opposite experiance. I have an iMac running vista, the vista half largely sorts itself out and will download all the updates in the background. Then when I shut down I get the option to install them then or just leave it (I have noticed though if I leave the machine turned on a lot of them appear to just get installed on their own). In contrast though on the mac half every time there's an update software update flashs up on the screen with it's icon bouncing away trying to stop what your doing. You then either stop what your doing and install the update or close it. Problem with this though is unless you remember to open software update and install the update os x will just let you turn the machine off with no reminder. Then next time you start working you get another prompt which you then cancel and it all repeats.
My issue here is while all the windows updates can happen when you turn the machine off and largely not affect you, with osx I either sit and wait to use my computer again or have to remember to install updates myself.
- The vast majority of people can't afford the good stuff and will pay for el-cheapo piece of crap product and then either deal with it in a mature way (c'est la vie...) or go into denial and think their piece of crap product is as good as the more expensive stuff.
- The few will have the money to afford the good stuff. They buy it and they immediately realize why it costs more and they become glad they paid more because it is so much much much better.
The ironic twist of this story is that Macs may have a slightly higher upfront fee, but over time you pay less because the system depreciate less and requires way less maintenance $$ and software $$.
There are companies that exist solely to peddle cheap rubbish and encourage a high-turnover. They couldn't care less about their reputation, as long as they sell the cheapest hardware they will still be successful and with a non-existant customer service, stiill profitablt. Apple is not one such company and it owes it's present success largely to it's reputation for building quality products.
We live in such a throwaway society that even computers now have because cheap accessories that need to be upgraded with the season.
The ironic twist of this story is that Macs may have a slightly higher upfront fee, but over time you pay less because the system depreciate less and requires way less maintenance $$ and software $$.
They're not optimized drivers. In fact, they're frequently broken (eg, using the microphone port on a MacBook Pro doesn't work in Vista or 7) or very old (like the packaged Nvidia drivers). On my MBP I've had to hack in more modern drivers, and got noticable speed gains out of it.
Can you tell us which drivers you've had to update to get the best performance?
When both Mac OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 were tested on a MacBook Pro, Apple's new operating system clearly beat Microsoft in terms of speed, a new test has shown.
Both operating systems were tested on a 2008 MacBook Pro machine by CNet,
from Apple.com Bootcamp support page:
"Important: Boot Camp supports only Microsoft Windows Home Edition and Professional with SP2 or later, and Microsoft Vista. The required Macintosh-specific drivers provided by Apple are only intended for these releases."
so the test is bullshit, it is unsupported firmware/drivers/software
The Mac software also unsurprisingly ran Apple's own native applications more efficiently. Converting a movie from M4 format to iPod in Quicktime X on Snow Leopard took 444.3 seconds, while Windows 7, with QuickTime 7 (the latest version available) took 723 seconds. Similarly, converting 17 songs in iTunes from MP3 to AAC took 149.9 seconds in Snow Leopard, while Windows 7 required 162 seconds.
Apple software is optimized for the apple OS, no shit Sherlock! run the test using Adobe compression tools, Avid, or some 3rd party cross platform tool and get back to me.
The test also found that Mac OS X 10.6 had better battery life on the MacBook Pro than Windows 7. The 2008 model has a removable battery. But author Dong Ngo said he believes Boot Camp drivers were mostly responsible for the Windows 7 battery life, as many PC laptops fared much better than the 77 minutes the Microsoft OS fared.
at least they touched on the fact that they were running it on a macbook...for Gods sake, I have 7 on a 4 year old laptop at work to determine a hardware baseline, and it gets like 3 hrs on a 4 year old battery.
OSX is definitely better than 7 outside of large managed enviornments, but hey, Windows is a lot better than these clowns make it look...I would expect this kind of yellow journaliosum from Macworld, but not from a PC centric publication like C|NET
When both Mac OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 were tested on a MacBook Pro, Apple's new operating system clearly beat Microsoft in terms of speed, a new test has shown.
Both operating systems were tested on a 2008 MacBook Pro machine by CNet, and each was given its own, separate, clean hard drive. The 64-bit version of each OS was included in the test, which measured a variety of speed and performance related tasks. Snow Leopard was given true, full 64-bit support with most of its native applications taking full advantage of modern processors.
Each OS had the same software installed: iTunes 9, QuickTime, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Cinebench R10. In the test, Snow Leopard booted and shut down significantly faster than Windows 7.
"In time-based tests, Snow Leopard consistently outdid Windows 7," the study found. "It took only 36.4 seconds to boot up, while Windows took 42.7 seconds. In a shutdown test, Snow Leopard took only 6.6 seconds, while Windows needed twice the amount of time: 12.6 seconds. Both computers, however, took just about 1 second to return from sleeping. For this reason, I didn't actually test the wake-up time as it was too short in both operating systems to produce meaningful numbers or even allow me to measure the difference."
The Mac software also unsurprisingly ran Apple's own native applications more efficiently. Converting a movie from M4 format to iPod in Quicktime X on Snow Leopard took 444.3 seconds, while Windows 7, with QuickTime 7 (the latest version available) took 723 seconds. Similarly, converting 17 songs in iTunes from MP3 to AAC took 149.9 seconds in Snow Leopard, while Windows 7 required 162 seconds.
The test also found that Mac OS X 10.6 had better battery life on the MacBook Pro than Windows 7. The 2008 model has a removable battery. But author Dong Ngo said he believes Boot Camp drivers were mostly responsible for the Windows 7 battery life, as many PC laptops fared much better than the 77 minutes the Microsoft OS fared.
One area where Windows 7 was able to easily trump Snow Leopard was in graphics performance. The system's 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics card helped the system score much better in the latest version of Windows, earning a 5,777 3D rendering score in Cinebench R10. Snow Leopard scored 5,437.
In testing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Windows 7 again came out on top, with an average 26.3 frames per second performance, compared to 21.2 frames per second within Snow Leopard.
Ngo's conclusion: Unless you are a gamer, get a Mac.
"If you can get by with just software designed by Apple and if money is not a big issue, you will be happy with a Mac," he said. "Examples of these software choices are iTunes, iLife, QuickTime, Safari, iChat, and so on (and you probably won't need much more than those for daily entertainment and communication needs). Finally, if money is not an issue--and it definitely is for most of us--you should get a Mac anyway. It's the only platform, for now, that can run both Windows and OS X."
See also:
Windows 7 vs. Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Exploring Windows 7 on the Mac
Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard
References and links would be nice.
The red computer is about as powerful as that computer in the middle.
Yeah, but which has Wifi?
Anyone with common sense can see this is biased. How about comparing Office versions?
Would be nice to see Adobe products comparison, too.
But it is completely irrelevant, IMHO.
Those "testers" forgot simple thing - for the price of MacBook or iMac units, PC users can get systems with Windows 7 that will utterly dominate - and still save some money.
So even if OSX is better optimized for hardware it is supposed to run with (which is hardly a surprise), bang-for-the-buck is definitely on the PC size.
Quad core Macs could level that a bit, if they come out.
Apple provides drivers for Windows 7. They are included in Snow Leopard DVD.
Drivers that come with Windows installation CD/DVD are by default not performing as good as fresh drivers downloaded from manufacturers' web sites. This in particular works for graphics drivers, but for others as well even if not to the same extend.
There is no conspiracy there - OS CD/DVD image has "locked" drivers from some point back in time, as it is really hard to update that image whenever new drivers are released. They are included to provide initial functionality, but it is up to user to grab latest drivers if he/she wants to squeeze better performance from computer.
So the question here is how good are W7 drivers included with OSX are? I'd be really surprised if they are latest and greatest.
How do you explain this:
http://gizmodo.com/317060/macbook-pr...vista-notebook
Well how do you know if machine is tested with basic drivers supplied with OSX or tester went an extra mile downloading fresh drivers from Intel, Nvidia, Realtek...?
Additionally, Apple did great job by securing latest hardware from Intel for that generation's MacBook; if I recall well, it was one of the fastest (if not the fastest) notebook on the market hardware wise, regardless OS installed.
But as other manufacturers got hold of same technology (and kept improving on it faster than Apple), you can find at the end of the article that (quote): Correction: The MacBook Pro's reign as fastest notebook ended on 10/25/2007, not 11/23/2007 as was previously reported. We apologize for the error.
I don't know what kind of magic is involved, but Windows 7 boots faster on my iMac compared to friends Dell.
2 Ghz C2D vs 3.06 Ghz C2D
4GB RAM vs 4GB RAM
1TB Hitachi vs 1TB WD
Go figure.
It is not too hard to figure, if you are really interested to.
Each software you install on computer - if it runs in the background - will add a bit to boot-up time. Antivirus, firewall, latest (usually bigger) drivers.
My Creative X-Fi audio card came with huge driver/apps package, and while it doesn't load everything on the startup, it did add a few seconds to my boot time compared to integrated Realtek audio.
Do you have exactly same hardware and software on both computers..?
i'm a bit puzzled why windows is able to perform graphics operations significantly better.
Because there is strong competition between Graphics cards manufacturers in PC segment and everyone is trying to squeeze last atom of optimization from their respective hardware. Graphics card drivers are being updated monthly, and while one really doesn't have to install every update, doing it 2-3 times a year will give better results in games and other graphics-intensive apps, specially with lower-end graphics.
High end graphics might have enough muscle in reserve not to be so dependable of drivers' optimization; if your card is giving you 80fps in a specific game, you don't really care if it could give you 120fps as you are not going to notice it anyway.
Additionally, Microsoft did good job with maturing DirectX over the last decade. OpenGL - when it comes to desktop applications - was left behind time ago.
Macs come with preinstalled graphics and choice is limited, such is volume of chips moved. I think those two factors are de-stimulating hardware manufacturers to invest too much time and effort in optimizing drivers for Macs. And considering that Macs are traditionally not gaming machines, having drivers good enough rather than best possible, is, well... good enough?
Yea, I looked at a mac pro with the side panel open just the other day to see everything "crammed" in there.... Get real.
Mac Pro is nice beast.
Has it ever been tried? Create a PC with high end, high price components that would cause that PC to be $2000.00? Can PC's plastic case handle the heat??
You'd be surprised - much better than any iMac, whatever they are made of
Which eats CPU cycles.
I actually had task manager opened and was looking at MSSE (MS Security Essentials, actually) while opening files, starting programs, checking email, installing Batman: Arkham Asylum (big game).
I failed to see MSSE creating any visible load on CPU. It has to, but it seems to be so low on resources and time intervals it fails to register in task manager.
Quad core CPU might be helping there.
Crappy article... Couldn't this have just as easily been titlted "Apple software runs slower under windows"? They really should have tested more non-apple software. Especially something modern and available in 64-bit on both, Lightroom comes to mind. for example.tOt would have been good to also see something like Photoshop which is 64-bit on Windows but 32-bit on Mac. I look forward to someone doing a proper and thourough review.
Photoshop was actually benchmarked some time ago, though on Vista 64 and Leopard (not 7 and SL) both clean-installed on MacBook Pro. Conclusion, if I remember correctly, was that PS on Leopard was a bit faster while processing smaller files, while large files did better on Vista. On average, they were pretty much the same.
Even if this was compared with a comparable HP system with a Macbook and Windows 7 edged OSX SL that still would be bad.
Tack on anti-virus and anti-malware software and you'll lose anywhere between 5 to 20% of your system performance. Then over time your registry becomes bloated and slows down lookups that all apps do and so on. Whatever edge Windows 7 had at the beginning is soon gone after a month of use.
On new quad core AV takes much, much less. Probably bellow 1% (my experience at least).
Registry bloating is over-exaggerated, as most Windows "problems" are observed here. With all the games, freeware, shareware... going through my PC, my load times or responsiveness in a year time does not change enough to be noticeable (I will run registry cleaner approximately once a year, by habit). For less demanding users, registry will not cause performance problem within the life of computer, old-fashioned as it is.
It's interesting how you sugarcoat the reality of Windows maintenance. I do it everyday and my job requires setting up windows machines for corporate and personal use.
Here's what you "conveniently" failed to mention in your points:
1) Windows Update does update everything it can. Unfortunately, it requires multiple restarts, multiple updating, and then those updates after restart requires even more updates to the updates it just applied. Then, any 3rd party add-ons and plugins need to be updated. Depending on the release-date of the install, it takes literally hours to get a windows PC fully patched and updated. Hours of lost productivity.
2) The Disk Defragmenter included with Windows is a crippled version of Executive Software's Diskeeper. It is useless and does little to address the problem. On corporate and personal levels, I install the full-version of Diskeeper and recommend to personal users to also purchase and install it. There are freeware version that holds promise that I've been testing called Defraggler from Piriform: http://www.piriform.com/defraggler . In addtion, I use another freeware product from Piriform called CCleaner http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner to keep the registry in check and remove all wasted disk space. It also has an excellent program uninstaller which does a better job of removing unwanted programs compared to the regular windows-supplied add/remove programs option. The sad part is that I have to seek 3rd party solutions since Microsoft does not provide for it or includes a crippled version of it for whatever reason. It's a sad state when I have to clean up registries that are so easily corrupted again impeding performance. Microsoft fails big-time in this area.
AntiVirus is a necessity for Windows folks. I personally don't use it on my personal windows machines since the performance hit of every vendor (including Microsoft's new - and free - AV solution) is just too much to accept. Is it any wonder why a Window's machine requires twice the horsepower just to keep all the necessary maintenance systems running? It's a joke.
So the point of my response to you is that Windows requires a ridiculous amount of handholding just to keep the system humming. My machines run great as I have the knowledge and knowhow to do it. But for the 99% of regular folk, it is a lesson in futility. Even when I get someone's machine running perfectly, in a month it will be back to some level of problem as windows does not do a good job to fend for itself.
If you really think that what is provided within Windows is adequate to keep a system running smoothly, I recommend to you that you don't quit YOUR day job. You probably have a very low standard of how a PC should run. Productivity takes a back seat in that case soon enough.
On the Apple systems I work on they take care of themselves right out of the box. Within 15 minutes, they are ready to go and be put to use. And in most cases, I never have to touch them again.
This is from years of experience on BOTH systems and it is my day job.
I figured out your opinion is extremely biased right at "Is it any wonder why a Window's machine requires twice the horsepower just to keep all the necessary maintenance systems running?"