Windows boots faster, feels faster, and benchmarked GPU and CPU considerably faster than macOS on the exact same hardware.
Not ground breaking news, but I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more. They claim they do or did, but I never noticed this in the later mountain named versions.
All a moot point now with Apple Silicon being the furture! :)
I didn't enjoy seeing my Intel macs get perceptually slower and slower with each release, and I'd be very afraid of how unoptimized the MacOS can get now, with a performance headroom Apple bought themselves with M1 :/.
Meanwhile my 2014-era Haswell gaming PC with an old 500 MB/s SATA SSD boots Windows 10 in a few seconds (about 4-5 times faster than my M1 Air).
I put Windows 10 on my old MacBook Pro and was shocked by how much more responsive it felt in Windows than in macOS. I thought the hardware was just too old because it was starting to feel sluggish in macOS, but Windows runs perfectly well on it.
Maybe Apple can continue to evolve their hardware fast enough that their software doesn’t need to be as efficient, but share your feelings that we’d all be better off if Apple had made responsiveness a priority.
https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo/raw/main/Docs/Medo.j...
They build in animation delays so that the experience of using the fastest computer and the slowest computer is the same.
Take for example moving one virtual desktop to the right with control-rightarrow. It’s slow AF compared to Windows or Linux with animations off. macOS also does vsync because they never ever want visual tearing in the UI. That slows you down again. Windows does not care if you set it to look like speedy sh## and will tear all day. It’s like a dune buggy, it’ll let you do whatever and if you lose an arm it’s your own fault.
macOS is a limo with your grandparents driving. “Can I open the sunroof?” “No, it might rain” “Can I watch TV?” “No, you’ll get carsick” “....” “Stop playing with the window control!”
Sorry to tell you this, but that road doesn’t go there.
Current hardware could run 10.0 like lightning.
As hardware improves, software rises to meet it. Maybe it’s because they can spend less effort on optimizing, or maybe it’s to add new features (like automatically running your photos through ML is the background, or continuously indexing the contents of every file in your entire hard drive), or maybe it’s because they want to add more layers of control (the protections around video playback), or maybe new layers of abstraction such as API calls instead of direct access to the hardware.
Whatever it is, we’ve seen the trends across every tech and almost every company for at least the past 30 years.
The M1 is supposedly really fast, but it's not like they optimise userspace for either architecture.
Booting is different on the M1, but once the kernel is alive and well it's just RISC vs CISC.
My point is that this all "mac is optimised for the hardware" "nonsense" is very non-techy. Sure they don't need to worry about drivers the same way, but it's still x86 or arm, people already target these so it's just about whose code and architecture is the better.
That being said, take a game that's been ported to both systems and run your mac in bootcamp with windows, and its not uncommon to pick up a good 10-20fps at least on games. I'm sure enterprise software especially the adobe suite runs a lot better on macos, because there was more engineering effort optimizing this port. I remember TF2 was most sriking on my 2012 macbook pro. On the mac OS side I was getting like 30-40fps on medium settings. Decent, I guess, for an ancient game. On windows in contrast, I was pushing 90fps, and it looked a lot better. That was the case for every single game I've tried.
The hardware drivers for things like CPU, GPU, the meat of the system, are much better on windows because the manufacturers just spend more effort building better drivers for this far larger market. Apple specific-sourced hardware that isn't an intel chip or some discrete GPU, like the trackpad experience, the display experience, how the fan is calibrated, are all subpar entirely on windows because Apple doesn't care to improve the bootcamp drivers. They are known to be supar, and on some Macs, the community even recommends their own drivers to use instead of the bootcamp ones, because Apple doens't care about the bootcamp experience.
The very first version of Photoshop was written on Macintosh and then later ported to Windows. But it would be interesting to know what the lineage of the code of the current version of Photoshop is. How much of it was written on OS X and macOS, and then ported to Windows, and how much is written on Windows and then ported to macOS.
I wish I got to browse the version control histories of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator some day. And also to talk with people who wrote these programs and hear them tell about it.
I use Windows for work everyday. I don't like it as much as Linux or osx but I can't say that I have issues you are describing with start menu lag or windows explorer. And that's with several phpstorm/pycharm instances open along with like a dozen services running in docker.
There are many problems with windows, but I don't think performance is one of them. Also it was a very long time ago, but XP was one of my favorite OS's. I think that was the last time where I could look at my process list and tell you exactly what each process is for.
We did it in part to benchmark some games which I do suspect will work better in Windows.
Even on an ancient computer once I turn off menu and window animation the start menu and small folders open with 0 spinning and probably less than 20ms.
Maybe your “fresh install” has a bunch of bloatware and virus scanners?
I agree with you on it being entirely puzzling and unexpected and will continue to poke at it for a while.
I have experienced that only once.
The computer was a $150 tablet from ~10 years ago, with 1GB RAM, 32 bit Windows 10 (sold with Windows 8, I think), and Intel Atom SoC for a CPU.
Computers with adequate amount of resources worked well for me, even very old ones.
Most importantly GPU drivers. Run dxdiag.exe, Display tab, it should say DirectDraw and Direct3D acceleration are both Enabled. For that particular iMac you need two of these drivers, because two GPUs.
Another possible thing is SATA driver. Normally installed automatically as a part of Windows, but I never tried running windows on Apple desktops. If Apple gives you Windows drivers install them, otherwise install CPU-Z, “Mainboard” tab, see the chipset, then install from intel.com.
I can't be 100% sure that solved everything, but it is perceptibly faster now. I'm not sure why Windows didn't auto-install those drivers. Perhaps it would have eventually done so during one of the Windows Update cycles, but your advice was very helpful, so thank you!
Bootcamp preferences are accessible from the notification tray icon and the old style control panel (availability of which depending on which windows 10 build you’re using IIRC)
Well, they did several things.
One of those was compressed memory at the OS level.
Another was a new, more optimized for SSDs, filesystem.