Snow Leopard faster than Windows 7

Only way to do a true test would be get generic Intel/nForce mobo with generic ram, cpu, hd ( all hardware that requires no modifying of osx dvd to run OSX native and Windows 7 native... that way u rule out Apple and Microsoft 's rule on hardware.....

Then Do the TESTS..... and then do Windows 7 with latest hardware drivers and compare all 3 results

END RESULT will be fair as u ll have Native OSX speed on Generic Hardware, OSX speed on real Hardware, Windows 7 on Generic Hardware with MS drivers and Windows 7 on Generic Hardware with Real Drivers

Done that test at home comparing my 2 Year old imac Dual 2.4 Ghz 3GB RAM Imac with a brand new Quad core HP desktop.

The Imac is alot quicker in booting 30 seconds, shutting down 4 seconds waking from sleep 2 seconds.

In other general apps also quicker at opening these than windows

Snowleopard might be faster, but I dont wanna turn into a arrogant conceited polo shirt fashion guru.
Plus there is the massive whole in your wallet every time a product gets upgraded.

Ill stick to my slower, non cool, virus riddled XP thanks.
XP is definitely not 'cool', but then it doesn't try to be

Its faster.
Get over it.

Seriously... Was paying twice over the odds for an under-specced machine really worth saving 12 seconds of your life?

Make a PC and overclock it, if you really need every second out of it.

Like how fast they each run Crysis? Oh wait, the Mac barely has any games to benchmark.

Boot time is mostly irrelevant IMHO, as long as it's not excessive. It's usually a one-time thing each day anyway. Far more important is the speed that apps load and run. The time to load various applications (e.g. Photoshop or Office apps) and perform some tasks would be a much more useful benchmark.

You can easily test OS X on a PC, after all they are just PC clones now Apple have realised they cant live without Intel.

Apple - for iDiots who cannot install drivers without a support call.

nya nya na nya nya mines quicker than yours.. lol i love fanboy arguments.... since when did speed equal quality !

So,a Mac runs on BULLSHIT...well that figures!
Methinks consumers vote with their wallets.
WOW..open the WINDOWS(7),wake up & smell the coffee!!

Nick, follow this up with a test on your own PC. Don't worry we can manage to all chip together to get a tech guy to come over to show you how to insert the DVD in the drive.

about what he's writing about (research? he's heard of it). Try reading the original CNET article, not a TH digest of it. See here http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31012_7-10319612-10355804.html

The only Apple specific drivers in Boot Camp are for the multi-touch touch pad, iSight webcam and backlit Keyboard. Everything else is just a bundling of the standard drivers from their respective manufacturers. You can download them yourself if you want, or Windows 7 will fetch the latest drivers for you.

As for running it on non Apple hardware, why? It's already been demonstrated that the Mac is one of the fastest machines you can run Windows on. If the Author had compared an Apple machine against some PC vendor's offering then people would be calling foul for that reason.

The real problem with this test is that they benchmarked Apple software (Quicktime and iTunes) - and not even the same version, what's with that? Of course those programs are more optimized for MACOS. A more neutral application benchmark would have been Photoshop. And what about pure synthetic tests of file system performance? Hello?

One might also ask how many Microsoft programs that you don't need running in the background are eating up memory usage? How many programs are running to make sure you aren't stealing from the company? How many hours a week do you spend trying to clean viruses, malware and other assorted nasty stuff from your hard drive? Do you really need Explorer running 24/7, when you're using Firefox? Do you really need space being taken up by Excel, or Powerpoint or God knows what else bundled with your software?

I've been on Mac for about a year now. I can't believe what I put up with for so long from Microsoft.

One might also ask why 12 seconds is worth the extra hundreds of dollars/pounds for the same hardware. One might also ask why not conduct more accurate benchmarks based on real world usage.

One would ask these questions, unless they had already drank the Apple Kool-Aid and now believe Steve Jobs is God and all his products perfect.

I don't spend hours cleaning viruses and malware. I have a good AV that updates itself. I start a malware scan with Malwarebytes once a week that runs overnight by itself and usually only finds cookies. I do the same overnight scan every 2 weeks for viruses with my AV, (NOD32) and never finds anything. They take 2 seconds to start and 2 seconds to close. Total time spent per month? 24-30 seconds. What about the hours MAC users have to waste looking for apps because what they used to use on the PC isn't available on MAC? Or the extra money spent for the same Windows app that costs more on MAC? (Office)

By Explorer, I guess you mean Internet Explorer and unless you have it open, it isn't running in the background. Explorer is the Windows Kernel. NOT the same thing. With a little tweaking and about 20 minutes you can have the background tasks down to the bare minimum.

111 minutes battery life on a $2000 machine? are you serious? i know apple buys all the reject hardware from the channel (like jmicron controlled SSD drives)but what did they get for batteries? some nicads from an old walkman?

WOW!!!!!!!!!!

An Apple OS is faster on Apple hardware than a generic OS? No .... really ???

I've spent 20 years in the industry and never had the desire to write technical articles, but all I get to read these days are pointless Windows Vs Linux Vs Mac comparisons written by talentless authors peddling mindless crap.
Will somebody please point me towards an educated journal?

Steve T, who has demonstrated that MACS are the fastest machines to run Windows on? It's the same hardware. You can build slower, faster or the same machines.

As an example, I built a machine at work last week for a customer with the following specs:

Core i7 extreme and Asus P6TD Deluxe
BR Burner
12Gb G.Skill DDR3 1600
2x WD Raptor 300 in RAID 0
Corsair 1000W PSU
2x Sapphire Radeon 5870's in crossfire
CM HAF 932
Windows 7 RC 64 bit

Total cost including fee for building and OS install: $3731.

I went to the Apple store and got as close as I could to these specs with a MAC Pro and still fell short on performance. They had no option for WD raptors and no MB RAID. So I had to use the generic 640GB drives that were the only option and RAID card ($700). Also the only video cards availible were pathetic Nvidia GT 120's. Cost? $5400. And even at nearly $1700 more, the MAC Pro doesn't come close to performance.

So tell me again, why did I want a MAC?

It's already been demonstrated that bootcamp affects the performance of windows. Why not flip the coin and bench OSX on an AMD based system and see how well it fairs?

How about testing Windows 7 on an i7 based Mac Pro or Macbook Pro. Oh that's right. Apple is usually a generation or so behind the rest of the PC industry. Its a known fact that Windows was designed to run their boot processes in parallel to speed up boot. And this notion that OS X is up and running in 30 seconds is a huge load of dung. In addition to the normal boot time there is a period after boot where the system is loading additional help apps a.k.a TSR's on the system. When running my 2.3Ghz MBP and Leopard the system could easily sit around for another 15 seconds in addition to that 30 second boot time. Windows 7 on the other hand is almost immediately responsive as soon as you see the desktop. (Again due to its support for using the multicores on the duals and quads.) Here's a thought. Try putting Win 7 on an i7 with an SSD. It has been well documented that we are looking at 11-20 second boot times with SSD drives. But of course no one will ever do that because the only way Apple or their fanbase ever reports the facts is when they can warp the truth to their own benefit. Please see your average Apple ad for reference on this.

And my BBC Model B is faster than your ZX Spectrum.

Now put your toys back in the pram and start behaving nicely to each other.

What kind of test is this?

Converting 17 mp3's? they use the same cpu and it's a cpu test, not an os test. The os will make almost no difference in this test. If there is a significant difference in time then the applications are probably compiled differently or use different routines to do the conversion. I guarantee you can find a different application that can convert the mp3's faster.

Battery times on a laptop are very dependant on the power saving drivers and modes. What is mac os doing (turning down screen brightness, turning off hard disks, reducing wifi transmission power etc) that windows 7 isn't, and is that because the windows 7 install doesn't have the same power saving features enabled? Again, I think this is not so much an OS thing as a configuration thing.

Gaming tests are almost pointless, everybody already knows you don't buy a mac if you want to play games.

Boot times are probably the only legitimate result, and as somebody else mentioned... do you really care that much if you boot 6 seconds slower?

Anandtech had some better laptop tests if anybody is really interested. They weren't awsome, but better than this.

If apple stopped vetoing nvidia drivers that let me use both graphics cards and allowed windows 7 to control the fan, I would never touch they impractical nallsh!t os again. If you arent browsing, listen, watching or edit and pic.vid, osx sucks.

... Theres one kind of apple that really has some quality behind it...

It's sharp, goes fast, and don't let you down... It's called APPLE PIE.

It's so good it won't be any left.

Know About APPLE COMPUTERS... they are all stuborn fashionable PCS who can't care a bit more for how much they cost.

APPLE COMPUTERS, bad.
APPLE PIES, good.

Know your mojo.

Its ok that Apple is doing great, really it is, the world will continue to spin, you'll continue to be a bitter thirty-something year old virgin, and I'll enjoy my non plastic $400 throw away computer.

Please never write another article again.

Apple is doing great... greatly overpriced cracking-n-exploding-n-paintjob-vanishing pieces of ...

lol "fruity" :)

Jesus, will this tedium never end. Look at the comments on any of this 'blogger's' articles. Always the same MO, flamebait article, watch the same old shite in the comments. INQ, it might get pageviews but feck is it DULL.

Which means a home-built clone running linux lol.

how fast is ubunut boot-net on the same machine? :P

And the fastest Lemming is leading the pack and the first one to run off the cliff. Being the fastest is not necessarily a reason to be proud AppleFANCHILD.

As a sniper I might say, 'You can run fast, but you'll just die tired'.

A Mac runs Windows faster than a PC counterpart. That was determined by none other than PC Magazine.

"A Mac runs Windows faster than a PC counterpart. That was determined by none other than PC Magazine."

journalism is falling apart, as is critical thinking in the readership.

At the end of the day when I get home from work. I rather use my Mac than my PC.

Absolutely agree with most comments and the author of this article... Not a fair comparison given the fact that apple controled most of the important software bits (not just the drivers btw).

With Snow Leopard no longer supporting old hardware (PowerPC macs) it's no wonder it's quicker.

If Microsoft dropped support for computers pre-Core2Duo I bet it would be a lot faster too.

Some excerpts from CNet's article (handpicked by a true Windows fanboy, aka me) :
" I was able to get the Windows OS up and running with Boot Camp 3.0 installed after less than an hour without any hiccups. Boot Camp 3.0 provided all the latest drivers for Windows 7 and no driver update was necessary.)"

"Windows 7 was tested with QuickTime 7 (version 7.6.4), which is 32-bit, and Snow Leopard was tested with QuickTime X, which comes with the OS[...]"

Why not use another program instead of crapTunes?

"Both computers were set up for high performance in power management. No other settings were changed. Windows 7's Visual Effects was left at "Let Windows choose what's best for my computer," which, in this case, equaled all items being checked except "Save taskbar thumbnail previews." Snow Leopard's graphic setting was set to "Hi-performance mode.""

Why set only OSX's desktop to Hi-performance?

I LOL'd at the article to be honest. It should be renamed to "Apple software runs better on Apple OS than Windows", that's pretty much the only thing you can conclude from the "test".

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land

...is faster than Windows Se7en.

PCLinuxOS is much nicer anyway, I can actually FIND and USE the control center quite easily. Windows Vista/Se7en just piss me off when I'm trying to get something done.

I use a Mac to get work done. I use my Mac to create not to tinker with hardware and chips. I don't care what my Mac costs because I can afford it. I use a Mac for the software not the hardware.
I don't play games.
I am an adult.
I am not a geeky tech.
I don't have a vested interest in keeping technology difficult to maintain.
I'm an artist. My mac is one of my tools.
My Mac does what I need. Why would I want to know anything about drivers? Why should I, you know, if the software is designed right?

On the other hand, Windows does help employ a lot of people who fix it on a regular basis. I guess that is good for the economy.

If everyone had a Mac, how many support jobs would be lost?