> Biggest thing to remmember is, we are running the very latest version > of Apple's OS on Macs that are in some cases 6 or more years old - > the fact that it works at all is a bloody miricle and testimont to > the likes of Ryan who makes these things happen. Try running XP on > anything less than a P4 and then see if we are hard done by!!!
I fear you exxagerate. I haven't tried "XP on less than a P4", but XP is not a lot more than a new shell on a caponised version of Windows 2000 Terminal Server, and I've run that on a non-MMX-Pentium-100. It's a lot closer to usable than OS X on the much faster PPC 604e on my 7600. The big problem with OS X is not the "unix base" or "it's a fatter OS" because it isn't. I'm running FreeBSD on a 386/20 with no FPU and 5M of RAM as a boot server, and it's usable for that job. I'm running NeXTstep 3.0 on a Mono slab and it's the same OS, pretty much. That's a 68040 at 25 MHz with 32M RAM. Either of them blow my pre-G3 OS 9 7600 out of the water when it comes to networking, disk, and in the case of the NeXT graphics and user interface as well. They can't do things like play MP3s or render web pages all that fast, because there's just so much you can do with a 25 MHZ CISC... but they're a heck of a lot more responsive than OS 9 on the 180 MHz RISC when raw CPU isn't the bottleneck. So if OS X had continued to use Quickdraw or Display Postscript as its rendering engine, it would almost certainly have been significantly faster on the same hardware than OS 9. So, what happened? The lickable GUI happened. The big performance problem is Quartz. Not only does it do an enormously complex job rendering those luscious antialiased translucent objects, but it renders the whole thing whether you can see it or not and only then does it paste the windows together on the screen... so it needs a fast processor AND it needs a bunch of RAM to hold all those pre-rendered bitmaps. I'm not saying it's not worth it, because it makes this poor old Frankenmac into something that my aging eyes can use all day without strain... it's just the way it is. So long as your graphics are up to it, and you have lots of RAM, OS X isn't a hog. And if you do, it's amazing how fast the non-Quartz rendering in Classic mode is. Photoshop under Classic feels a lot faster than any Quartz-based software. I would say that any machine fast enough to run OS X and with enough memory (so, that Bondi blue iMac is iffy) is going to be entirely usable. Worst comes to worst, use it as a shell about Classic and stop worrying about performance going in the toilet when you do file sharing. :) It's still a pity Adobe pulled on the choke chain when it came to porting Photoshop to Yellow Box and licensing DPS cheaply. If Rhapsody had come out on schedule with good performance on first generation PCI Powermacs... -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive <http://www.mail-archive.com/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
