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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Sunday, October 12, 2003

Panther: Poorer performance than Jaguar?
One of the things Apple fans always claim is that each new Mac OX release brings with it new performance gains, forgetting each time that they made the same claim with the last release, which they are suddenly dissing in favor of the newer version. I've upgraded my Macs each and every time a new OS X version is made available, whether it's a store-bought version like OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) or a free downloadable update, like 10.2.8, and I've not seen any performance improvements big or small since the 10.1 release, which was basically just a performance-tuned version of the original OS, which was itself released months before it was ready. With Panther, coming in less than two weeks, the Mac pundits are out in force again, claiming that, yes, this release will be the one, the moment when the performance of OS X in daily tasks finally rivals that of OS 9 (this never-ending performance problem comes despite the fact that Mac processor speeds have more than tripled in the interim, incidentally). Apparently, though, Jaguar won't offer a speed boost. In fact, "Dr. Mac," one of the world's foremost "Mac lover in undo position of affecting the opinions of others," and a man more apt to blindly blurt out the superiority of all things Apple than provide an honest examination of that company's products, this week published a story in which he simply couldn't sugar-coat the truth. "Apple should bite the bullet and say that OS X requires [a bare minimum of] 256 MB of RAM, or better still, 512 MB," he writes. "Every Mac I own has the maximum RAM it can hold ... [Using the bare minimum amount of RAM,] a Mac will run like frozen sludge, regardless of which version of Mac OS X you're using." So we'll need to max out the RAM, that's a good sign. It seems the new cat in town is a bit of a porker. I'll load up the final version of Panther on October 24 of course, but once again, I'm not expecting much, given my disapointment with the performance of previous versions and the multitude of UI changes Apple is making. The company just can't seem to walk away from pointless eye candy, and I suspect that's the root of the problem.

[ Posted at 9:27 AM | Permalink ]