Brightrev

Popular Mechanics recently gathered a group of consumers to rate and test Macs versus PCs.  In some ways, the results weren't surprising.  Leopard is faster than Vista and the testers expressed a mild preference for the Macs over the PCs.  However, I like both operating systems and there is more to the test than just the results, which I discuss in my article. 

I agree that Leopard is faster than Vista.  My Mac Mini with Leopard boots faster, responds better and just generally feels snappier in day to day use than my similar Vista machine.  However, when I say Leopard is "faster", I'm talking about an extremely small difference in performance.  Vista's performance is absolutely fine.  My Mac mini sits right next to my Vista machine, so I can switch back and forth whenever I want.  Aside from the Mac's much faster startup time, I have to use Vista and Leopard side-by-side to notice the difference at all.  It's like one car finishing two tenths faster in the quarter mile.  Someone who spends their life driving cars would notice the difference, but to everyone else, they're the same.

I have a few problems with how the author measured performance. The article doesn't specify how Windows was installed, so I have to assume it was an OEM preinstall.  I haven't used either of the PCs they tested, but OEM preinstalled PCs are generally ladened with crap software and often have performance sucking applications like Norton Internet Security installed.  In addition, the Gateway had a 20% slower processor than the iMac.  The author should have made a better effort to match specifications on the test machines.

On one hand, the test is an apples (heh!) to oranges comparison in the sense that Apple puts a nice clean Leopard install on their computers, while Windows OEMs sell you a car with anvils tied to its bumper.  Clean installs with good security software make an enormous difference in the performance of a Windows Vista system.  On the other hand, most people buy their PCs from OEMs, it's unreasonable to expect consumers to reinstall the operating system and many OEMs don't ship DVDs that even have that option.  The article notes that Windows Vista ran faster on the Macs than on the PCs in spite of the similar hardware, which is more evidence that clean installs run faster.  From a pure Vista versus OS X perspective, it would have been better to install Windows on the Macs via BootCamp and run the benchmarks there. 

The article also doesn't mention whether Vista was allowed time to build its SuperFetch cache.  The test notes that Internet Explorer took 6.3 seconds to load on the Gateway PC.  I use Firefox as my regular browser, so I only open IE a few times a day, and it loads in under a second.  In fact, everything on Vista loads incredibly fast on the second and subsequent runs.  That 6.3 second number looks like a problem to me, but there's no way for me to prove it, and I don't know enough about their testing methodology to tell where they went wrong.

One issue that stood out was Vista's poor shutdown times.  When I saw the 44 second shutdown time noted for the Gateway PC, I literally thought it was a typo.  Then I saw the 25 second shutdown time for the Asus laptop, and thought it must be way out of line, so I tested my own PC.

I tried shutting down my Vista PC with nothing running, and found the article's numbers were right on.  It took 25 seconds from the time I clicked Shut Down until the PC powered off.  What I realized is that I essentially never shut my computers down.  My PC and Mac are set to sleep after they've been idle, so they're either running, in sleep mode or rebooting.  I never noticed how slowly Vista shuts down because I almost never turn it off.

The article is interesting, and though it has some problems, its results are in line with my expectations.  Leopard is faster, if only a bit.  People prefer the industrial design of Macs and the OS X is generally simpler than its Vista counterpart.

However, I'd caution people not to make decisions based on an application launching one second faster on either platform. Both operating systems are good, and Vista is better than Windows XP on new hardware.  I think Macs are better for novice users and other consumers who aren't tied to Windows.  For people who are comfortable with Windows and businesses that need working directory integration and management, Vista is the better choice.

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