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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> Windows boots faster, feels faster, and benchmarked GPU and CPU considerably faster than macOS on the exact same hardware.

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.

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It would be more fair to compare a brand new Windows installation vs a brand new macOS installation. New installations of macOS and Windows always run significantly faster than older installations, in my experience (heck, even new installations of iOS run faster).

Windows 10 does boot faster and launches apps faster than Mac OS, on the same hardware. However Mac apps are just as or more responsive and better at running in the background once they've launched. This is my experience.

Wait until you try Haiku on the same hardware. I’ve got a 4K video editor with no HW acceleration yet is smoother to edit videos than both OSX and Win10.

https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo/raw/main/Docs/Medo.j...

Here’s one of the dirty secrets of macOS:

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!”

Any source for that?

For which?

> continue to evolve their hardware fast enough that their software doesn’t need to be as efficient

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.

Sometimes wiping the drive and reinstalling can boost responsiveness on its own.

This is true. Most of these comparisons are between a well-used system with a brand-new one. “Of course Firefox feels snappier than Chrome, you haven’t installed your 20 extensions yet.” A so on.

Now do the same but with OS X 10.9 instead of Windows. It has gotten so much slower...

OS X 10.4 was the best release they ever had from a stability and speed perspective.

You mistyped SnowLeopard (10.6)

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