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stop the whining!
Authored by: marcinjeske on May 21, '02 02:32:35AM
Authored by: ibook


Would it be fair for me to be a bit miffed if my iBook worked slower under Jaguar than under OSX.1?


Would people tell me to stop whining if my DVD player didn't work under Jaguar?


I'm interested in the expectations of Apple's loyal customers.



These are all fair questions.


I'll reference the doctor's credo of "Do no harm." All other things being equal, a computer should perform the same tasks at the same speed or better after an OS upgrade. In other words, we should lose neither features nor speed.


Having said that, I should clarify that there will be times when it is in the best interests of customers as a whole to remove a feature or make it run slower.


1. Features which are impeding the progress of the OS as a whole. Believe it or not, in theory, the Mac OS' original symmetric multitasking is more efficient than Mac OS X's preemptive multitasking. But, like communism, practice has shown otherwise. That "feature" was removed... at much pain, and although a Mac OS X computer should feel "snappier" (well, once they fix a whole bunch of things), it fundamentally will not give as much performance to your applications.


2. Features which have obsolesced or been little used. We all miss OpenDoc and it's sidekick CyberDog (well, some of us do), and QuickDraw GX ellicits emotion in a few. Remember PowerTalk? These technologies all went to the grave years before Steve Jobs stuck Mac OS 9 in a coffin. The Mac lost features. But few people cared... because they hadn't caught on in the market.


3. Adding good features which slow down older features. Spell checking is an excellent example. Standard text entry in Mac OS X will be slower... because Apple has enabled live spellchecking in every text area. We are paying a price, but the utility is excellent. I get annoyed now when an application isn't using the standard text fields (for instance, as I type this is Mozilla) because I've gotten used to having the computer correct my spelling.


-Marcin

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