· 3 min read
The truth about operating systems: MacOSX
My take on MacOSX after years of use: its strengths as a UNIX system and the performance loss in recent versions.
Episode rescued from the SeViR Notes archive and translated from Spanish. Originally published on January 20, 2015.
After quite a few years as a MacOSX user, and having grown disillusioned over the last year, I have a pretty well-formed opinion of the joys and headaches a MacOSX machine can bring.
Apple’s operating systems have always been known for good performance and for being optimised for graphics and video work. One of their big leaps forward, and a bet on the future, was going with a UNIX kernel while keeping a superb graphics layer and an easy-to-use interface. That’s how the MacOSX series was born.
I can’t lie to you: using MacOSX every day, as a user or as a programmer, is quite an experience. The operating system is designed to be extremely easy to use, which you notice as soon as you install a program by simply dragging and dropping it into the Applications folder. It ships with a good number of useful applications (a superb mail client, maps, notes, an image viewer, etc.) and features you feel you’ll never be able to live without, like Spotlight, Quick Look (preview any document with the space bar) or the Dock, the application bar, which is much flashier yet at the same time extraordinarily light and easy to use.
Unfortunately (I don’t know whether it has anything to do with it), since Steve Jobs’s death, while Microsoft was making Windows lighter and faster, MacOSX has become slower, with more lag in tasks as simple as checking email, opening applications or everyday use, demanding more powerful hardware. And not because our machines weren’t powerful enough.
I’ve been working with MacOSX, programming and running Windows applications in emulation without any problems, but from one version to the next (practically overnight) it felt as if my laptop had aged several years, with performance getting steadily worse. Mavericks and Yosemite have added few improvements, just a few small apps and some ideas from the iPhone, but also higher requirements which, strangely, never seem to be enough…
When the Mavericks updates started rolling out, the web was full of complaints from users with Apple machines packing 32GB of RAM and powerful processors that ran noticeably slower after upgrading.
It seems everything worked fine up to the 10.8.x versions, and from there on Apple started making the very mistakes that used to be blamed on Microsoft.
Even so, MacOSX has a lot going for it. Its UNIX heart lets us do web development as if it were Linux, there are many equivalent applications, and file paths are similar, although the UNIX side is usually hidden from the user, who only sees the folders they care about. MacOSX applications usually shine in their user interface and ease of use; developers of MacOSX apps tend to make really good applications, the kind Windows and Linux users often look upon with envy.