10 ms·

Hopefully the new macs are faster. Here's something you can try yourself: My 10 year old Macbook pro running lion, if I go to the Safari menu in the corner cli

Hopefully the new macs are faster. Here's something you can try yourself: My 10 year old Macbook pro running lion, if I go to the Safari menu in the corner click it and move the mouse up and down really quickly over the menu items, the responsiveness is instant & there is no flickering. Doing the same with the * * max spec * * 16" Macbook Pro has flickering. Easily reproducible in this very Safari window if you're reading this on a Mac. Everything has been downhill this decade with the quality. If the focus was on ARM then hopefully if it was a resource diversion the quality is good after. Well i hope at least..

wodenokoto 6y ago
The annoying thing is this is what mac was famous for, for a long time. Often, the price would give you considerable lower specs than a PC, but the mac would be faster to desktop, faster to start working in an application, smoother IU, longer battery life, etc. Focus on macs used to be "faster to work with, not faster to calculate with" It was those things that warranted the higher price tag.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Surely not during classical Mac OS days. Working on those LC II was more of a need that nothing else was available at the computer lab than anything else.
  - rjsw 6y ago
    A Quadra 950 feels fast running old Mac OS applications.
    - antonyh 6y ago
      I concur. Booted up my G4 this week, on OS9. Feels so much faster than anything released this century. So much so, I'm keeping it as an air-gapped word processor. Modern computers, SSDs, super fast RAM, GPUs etc, all needed for computing. But the older machines with outdated hardware, low and slow RAM, and tiny slow PATA or SCSI HDDs feel so fast. I don't doubt that the Quadra feels just as quick. It's not just Apple, same goes for Windows of the same pre-Y2K era compared to now. The question is why. Why is the user experience so poor. Why is it all so sluggish now. Have we exchanged performance for developer convenience just to punt out more underperforming software? Is the art of creating fast UI code dying out? Is the shift from C/C++ to Swift/.net interpreted bytecode-type solutions the cause? Too many layers of abstraction, too much cross-platform code with compromises to make it run anywhere? Whatever it is, we're churning out software quicker now but on faster hardware it runs worse than the older tools. It feels backwards to me.
      - chooseaname 6y ago
        > The question is why. Why is the user experience so poor. Why is it all so sluggish now. Have we exchanged performance for developer convenience just to punt out more underperforming software? Generally speaking, yes. We prioritize speed to market over everything always.
        Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        Why? I can maybe understand it in the early experimental phase, but there ought to be a point where the software's authors go back and do it properly. It's worth the effort! If one application is significantly more responsive, people will think it feels nicer to use.
        WalterSear 6y ago
        Because speed to market equals speed to market dominance.
      - mycall 6y ago
        > The question is why. Simple answer: Abstractions.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Not when measured against PCs or graphical UNIX workstations of the same age.
      - rjsw 6y ago
        You couldn't run Mac OS applications on a PC or UNIX workstation. The point is that older Mac software was written to run well on the hardware. WriteNow on the Q950 is particularly fast. I haven't run any benchmarks but I would expect the Q950 to be comparable to an early SUN SPARCstation, the Q950 has more RAM too. I do run NetBSD on both of them.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        I thought we were comparing platforms over here, that was the whole point of my remark regarding the LC II usage at the computer lab.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > Often, the price would give you considerable lower specs than a PC, but the mac would be faster to desktop, faster to start working in an application, smoother IU, longer battery life, etc. Focus on macs used to be "faster to work with, not faster to calculate with" Linux is the new Mac, then. It's really fast even on otherwise low-end hardware, and the price tag is pretty hard to beat.
  - mmargerum 6y ago
    How is power management these days on laptops? That was my biggest issue with Linux. I'd like to run it on one of my older macs.
    - yaantc 6y ago
      Make sure TLP is installed, and it should be fine. I'm using mainstream laptops (Thinkpad, Latitude) and with TLP I have a better battery life with Linux than with Windows 10. https://linrunner.de/tlp/ https://linrunner.de/tlp/
  - tomxor 6y ago
    > Linux is the new Mac As a Linux desktop convert I find it hard to disagree. I used and owned macs from the 68k through PPC and one intel (C2D), they were all fast (to use), that last intel one from 2009 still felt slick... but that's where it stopped for me, everything got super bloated and slow afterwards. I may not be 100% correct here but it seems like most of the problems are with their OS and software, which is a shame because they are the only remaining computer company that has retained control over all of their hardware and software - something that should have always given them an edge in fine tuning, but they seem to be throwing it all away.
    - eitland 6y ago
      FWIW I wrote this on my blog the other day which supports your observations from another angle: > I have seen developers starting to use Linux machines for a few years already. It kind of reminds me of how it felt like when devs started to adopt Macs around 2005/2006 or so when Ruby on Rails became popular. And just like when Macs became popular, mainstream adoption seems to follow: I've already seen a sales guy running Ubuntu Linux (by his own choice) over a year ago. Note: the driving forces aren't exactly the same, but the feeling is reasonably similar in my opinion. Also I should note that the adoption of Linux among sales and other non-devs has surprised me.
- mmargerum 6y ago
  I guess you never used the original Mac
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Oh come now, that's not fair. GP was talking about ten years ago, not 30.
    - mmargerum 6y ago
      Yeh I know heh. Was a joke. You will have to pry this macbook pro from my cold dead hands.
- scarface74 6y ago
  This is definitely not true. Macs were much slower UI wise than PCs. Most PCs came bundled with graphics cards. Most Macs used integrated graphics. It was especially bad in the 90s.
sgt 6y ago
That's weird. What did they break in the 16 inch model? Surely driver related. For reference, my MBP 2018 model is lightning fast doing that test of yours. I am running Mojave.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  They could be pinning the refresh rate.
- drcongo 6y ago
  Same Mac, OS and result here too.
- mattgreenrocks 6y ago
  Yeah, there's something weird with the 16in integrated GPU. Hard to tell if it's the OS, the driver, or the hardware. I've run into performance regressions in the JetBrains Rider IDE that make typing absolutely miserable. I suspect they are related to the slow iGPU.
  - sgt 6y ago
    Is that with or without an external screen connected? I have also had issues in the past with JetBrains IDE's when I had a HiDPI (retina) external screen connected. When only using the laptop screen, it was quick. It turned out to be a JetBrains issue (in fact an underlying Java graphics rendering issue).
    - mattgreenrocks 6y ago
      Without an external display. Probably a Java graphics issue like you said.
coldcode 6y ago
The modern Mac is blazing fast hardware. The UI however still has a lot of ancient baggage which drags performance down. I am running a PC game on my iMac that is written in Direct-X at full frame rates via Crossover. Metal is incredibly fast access to the GPU, yet the Finder is still lame at doing lots of things. Like any 20+ year old technology, it's a combo of old baggage holding on alongside massive improvements. Windows 10 is no different, just in different ways. I do wish Apple spent a little more time on general performance and usability improvements (looking at you Xcode) but I know supporting a massive codebase with such a long legacy is really hard. That said Apple doing their own hardware has always been the ultimate goal. End to end control was always the dream.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >The modern Mac is blazing fast hardware. Ryzen 4000 has something to say about that ;)
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Ryzen 4000 may be blazinger, but that doesn't mean those 10th gen Intel CPUs are slow. I can order a machine that outspecs a MacPro from Dell or Lenovo, but it won't be as tightly integrated as a Mac
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  With 6/8 threads and a low/mid-end GPU there is nothing "blazing fast" about the hardware. They are common, average components for laptops. The build quality and software is where macOS was always excellent when Jobs was at the helm. Now software is finicky, lacks support for standards and the build quality cannot be trusted as a whole.
  - pdpi 6y ago
    > They are common, average components for laptops. The point is precisely that. Average components are blazingly fast these days.
  - 6y ago
rbanffy 6y ago
Retina screens mean considerably more work. On Lion you only had a fixed size bitmap that could be moved around easily, but, with a high density screen, you have multiple densities that need to be computed and cached and that take at least 4x more memory. Also, Catalina is doing a lot more work under the hood than Lion. What I saw was not flickering, but that I could move the pointer faster than a bar could be rendered and that the UI opted not to render it in that case. Is that what you refer to?
- Hamuko 6y ago
  >Retina screens mean considerably more work. On Lion you only had a fixed size bitmap that could be moved around easily Didn't the first retina MacBook Pro ship with Lion?
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I think the first Retinas didn't have fractional scaling. I think it was hard coded at 2x scale. Not sure, though. My 15" presents 5 possible scaling options.
    - grishka 6y ago
      I still use the first-generation retina and it does have the same 5 scaling options.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        With the original OS?
        grishka 6y ago
        IIRC yes but the scaled options were so laggy they were hardly usable. It improved with updates.
        6y ago
knolan 6y ago
Here is my 16" doing what you suggest: https://imgur.com/v4HNhZY https://imgur.com/v4HNhZY Moving frame to frame you see that the blue highlight lags the mouse by one or two frames. Seems okay to me, I don't see any flickering.
- lloeki 6y ago
  There is visible flickering during the last second. Moving frame by frame: the blue highlight goes unseen together with Clear History, then it's Settings for This Website, then Hide Others, then Quit Safari twice, the highlight reappears on Hide Safari, then disappears with Clear History. A little bit later Settings for This Website is highlighted but the text stays dark instead of becoming white.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  At the 4 sec mark in your video the text "Clear History..." vanishes resulting in flicker. I have a screenshot if you want.
  - knolan 6y ago
    I see it now, thanks for pointing it out. Just for fun I recorded it with the 240 fps video mode on my phone and you can see that the text colour is changing from black to white in response to the mouseover but the blue highlight does not always render. Taking a new screen recording I did a quick time-space plot in Matlab. https://imgur.com/a/Pih5Q8m https://imgur.com/a/Pih5Q8m It appears to be an issue when you move your mouse more than one pixel per frame of the refresh rate.
    - danielscrubs 6y ago
      Nice work!
- cwhiz 6y ago
  Yeah this has got to be peak absurdity. Inspecting menu responsiveness frame by frame.
bob1029 6y ago
This is not just happening to Apple. Every tech giant is losing sight of the fundamental experience over marketable features, shiny and profit. There are a lot of places you could assign blame for this nonsense, but perhaps a better path would be to just start a new company and release products that don't suck. Surely there is at a small, yet viable market out there for "how macbooks used to be prior to 2014". I'd throw my wallet at the first company to produce an exact clone of the late 2013 macbook pro running a non-shit variant of OSX. This is easy money sitting on the table, but there's probably more money in shoving 12 month product cadences down everyone's throats.
- chooseaname 6y ago
  Wait, why not 2014? I have a mid-2014 13" rMBP and it's pretty great (except MacOS has gotten worse). What changed after 2013?
  - bob1029 6y ago
    I actually have no strong opinion regarding the 2014 year. 2013 was just when I happened to step into the store and pick one up. I believe they're pretty close in terms of features/quality.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Well, the last non-shit version of OS X is Mavericks, which came out in 2013. :) (I'm not 100% sure whether the 2014 MBP can run Mavericks, it depends on when exactly in 2014 in was released.)
    - birdyrooster 6y ago
      Wrong the last non-shit version is Leopard because I can run it on PPC. You can’t prove me wrong unless you escalate the purity spiral.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        Well, for what it's worth, I practice what I preach—I'm typing this on a Hackintosh I purpose-built for Mavericks compatibility in early March. :) But just for fun, if your benchmark is Power PC support then I am delighted to introduce the latest version of OS X that can run on your hardware: newly-PPC-compatible Snow Leopard! https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsuppo...
chooseaname 6y ago
Is this due to Retina Scaling? Have you tried it after using an app like Display Menu to choose a non Retina scaled resolution?
userbinator 6y ago
What you want is lower latency, not necessarily higher throughput. Unfortunately it's not just Apple, it seems newer hardware in general is less responsive: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ The iPhones and iPads are quite good, however, but I suspect it's because Apple specifically optimised them to be.
- dx034 6y ago
  For me that's one of the major advantages of iPhones over Androids. Android has always had those micro-delays. On a new device in the price range of an iPhone they're acceptable but it's (subjectively) never as smooth as an iPhone. I was always curious if it's closer integration between hardware and software or if Google just doesn't really care about it as it doesn't hurt sales.
  - aequitas 6y ago
    I recently switched back from Android to iPhone with the new iPhone SE. I was just blown away with the speed and tactility of the iPhone. Just how the hardware and software work together to make it one experience. Whereas my Android always felt slow and laggy. Granted it was a mid-range one, but still, basic things like opening and switching apps should come with seconds delay and loading times.
aequitas 6y ago
If I remember correctly it was Lion (or Leopard?) that was an actual performance improvement on the previous instalment of Mac OS X. It was just so much notable snappier. Haven't had a single update since then that did the same.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I believe you're thinking of Snow Leopard. Definitely not Lion, which was a somewhat poor release, and not Leopard, which had a lot of performance issues initially. Mountain Lion is also a possible candidate (because it fixed the problems with Lion), or Mavericks if you were on memory-constrained hardware (because it introduced memory compression). But it's probably Snow Leopard.
  - jki275 6y ago
    Snow Leopard was essentially a maintenance release, and I think you're correct there with the rest.
  - aequitas 6y ago
    You could be correct there with Snow Leopard, definately not Mavericks. It was a release without a lot of new features but more under the hood stuff.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      It really could be Mavericks in that, if you upgraded a machine with 4 GB of memory or less (which were still fairly common at the time!), I'd expect you to see a significant speed improvement. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compre... I've seen this work and it makes a big difference.
ubermonkey 6y ago
That doesn't seem like a reasonable test. I dunno about interface responsiveness, but things I actually want to DO -- server virtualization, Lightroom, etc. -- sure do seem faster on my new rMBP than they did on my 5 year old model.
illumin8 6y ago
I just opened Safari and tried this on my 16" MBP (8-core i9, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) and I don't see any delays or flickering. The menus draw the same as they do on my work 15" MBP (2019, 8-core i9, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD).
hvge 6y ago
This is a weird bug in Catalina, related to an external mouse. If you try the same menu responsivity test with the trackpad, then it’s OK and everything’s instant. Basically, everything you do with the external mouse is sluggish, until you re-login or restart the machine. I blame a memory leak in the WindowServer for it. Once it has over couple of GB allocated RAM, then the mouse is basically unusable. Especially text selection by mouse is a nightmare :)

wodenokoto 6y ago

The annoying thing is this is what mac was famous for, for a long time. Often, the price would give you considerable lower specs than a PC, but the mac would be faster to desktop, faster to start working in an application, smoother IU, longer battery life, etc. Focus on macs used to be "faster to work with, not faster to calculate with" It was those things that warranted the higher price tag.

pjmlp 6y ago
Surely not during classical Mac OS days. Working on those LC II was more of a need that nothing else was available at the computer lab than anything else.
- rjsw 6y ago
  A Quadra 950 feels fast running old Mac OS applications.
  - antonyh 6y ago
    I concur. Booted up my G4 this week, on OS9. Feels so much faster than anything released this century. So much so, I'm keeping it as an air-gapped word processor. Modern computers, SSDs, super fast RAM, GPUs etc, all needed for computing. But the older machines with outdated hardware, low and slow RAM, and tiny slow PATA or SCSI HDDs feel so fast. I don't doubt that the Quadra feels just as quick. It's not just Apple, same goes for Windows of the same pre-Y2K era compared to now. The question is why. Why is the user experience so poor. Why is it all so sluggish now. Have we exchanged performance for developer convenience just to punt out more underperforming software? Is the art of creating fast UI code dying out? Is the shift from C/C++ to Swift/.net interpreted bytecode-type solutions the cause? Too many layers of abstraction, too much cross-platform code with compromises to make it run anywhere? Whatever it is, we're churning out software quicker now but on faster hardware it runs worse than the older tools. It feels backwards to me.
    - chooseaname 6y ago
      > The question is why. Why is the user experience so poor. Why is it all so sluggish now. Have we exchanged performance for developer convenience just to punt out more underperforming software? Generally speaking, yes. We prioritize speed to market over everything always.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        Why? I can maybe understand it in the early experimental phase, but there ought to be a point where the software's authors go back and do it properly. It's worth the effort! If one application is significantly more responsive, people will think it feels nicer to use.
        WalterSear 6y ago
        Because speed to market equals speed to market dominance.
    - mycall 6y ago
      > The question is why. Simple answer: Abstractions.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Not when measured against PCs or graphical UNIX workstations of the same age.
    - rjsw 6y ago
      You couldn't run Mac OS applications on a PC or UNIX workstation. The point is that older Mac software was written to run well on the hardware. WriteNow on the Q950 is particularly fast. I haven't run any benchmarks but I would expect the Q950 to be comparable to an early SUN SPARCstation, the Q950 has more RAM too. I do run NetBSD on both of them.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        I thought we were comparing platforms over here, that was the whole point of my remark regarding the LC II usage at the computer lab.
zozbot234 6y ago
> Often, the price would give you considerable lower specs than a PC, but the mac would be faster to desktop, faster to start working in an application, smoother IU, longer battery life, etc. Focus on macs used to be "faster to work with, not faster to calculate with" Linux is the new Mac, then. It's really fast even on otherwise low-end hardware, and the price tag is pretty hard to beat.
- mmargerum 6y ago
  How is power management these days on laptops? That was my biggest issue with Linux. I'd like to run it on one of my older macs.
  - yaantc 6y ago
    Make sure TLP is installed, and it should be fine. I'm using mainstream laptops (Thinkpad, Latitude) and with TLP I have a better battery life with Linux than with Windows 10. https://linrunner.de/tlp/ https://linrunner.de/tlp/
- tomxor 6y ago
  > Linux is the new Mac As a Linux desktop convert I find it hard to disagree. I used and owned macs from the 68k through PPC and one intel (C2D), they were all fast (to use), that last intel one from 2009 still felt slick... but that's where it stopped for me, everything got super bloated and slow afterwards. I may not be 100% correct here but it seems like most of the problems are with their OS and software, which is a shame because they are the only remaining computer company that has retained control over all of their hardware and software - something that should have always given them an edge in fine tuning, but they seem to be throwing it all away.
  - eitland 6y ago
    FWIW I wrote this on my blog the other day which supports your observations from another angle: > I have seen developers starting to use Linux machines for a few years already. It kind of reminds me of how it felt like when devs started to adopt Macs around 2005/2006 or so when Ruby on Rails became popular. And just like when Macs became popular, mainstream adoption seems to follow: I've already seen a sales guy running Ubuntu Linux (by his own choice) over a year ago. Note: the driving forces aren't exactly the same, but the feeling is reasonably similar in my opinion. Also I should note that the adoption of Linux among sales and other non-devs has surprised me.
mmargerum 6y ago
I guess you never used the original Mac
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Oh come now, that's not fair. GP was talking about ten years ago, not 30.
  - mmargerum 6y ago
    Yeh I know heh. Was a joke. You will have to pry this macbook pro from my cold dead hands.
scarface74 6y ago
This is definitely not true. Macs were much slower UI wise than PCs. Most PCs came bundled with graphics cards. Most Macs used integrated graphics. It was especially bad in the 90s.

sgt 6y ago

That's weird. What did they break in the 16 inch model? Surely driver related. For reference, my MBP 2018 model is lightning fast doing that test of yours. I am running Mojave.

rbanffy 6y ago
They could be pinning the refresh rate.
drcongo 6y ago
Same Mac, OS and result here too.
mattgreenrocks 6y ago
Yeah, there's something weird with the 16in integrated GPU. Hard to tell if it's the OS, the driver, or the hardware. I've run into performance regressions in the JetBrains Rider IDE that make typing absolutely miserable. I suspect they are related to the slow iGPU.
- sgt 6y ago
  Is that with or without an external screen connected? I have also had issues in the past with JetBrains IDE's when I had a HiDPI (retina) external screen connected. When only using the laptop screen, it was quick. It turned out to be a JetBrains issue (in fact an underlying Java graphics rendering issue).
  - mattgreenrocks 6y ago
    Without an external display. Probably a Java graphics issue like you said.

coldcode 6y ago

The modern Mac is blazing fast hardware. The UI however still has a lot of ancient baggage which drags performance down. I am running a PC game on my iMac that is written in Direct-X at full frame rates via Crossover. Metal is incredibly fast access to the GPU, yet the Finder is still lame at doing lots of things. Like any 20+ year old technology, it's a combo of old baggage holding on alongside massive improvements. Windows 10 is no different, just in different ways. I do wish Apple spent a little more time on general performance and usability improvements (looking at you Xcode) but I know supporting a massive codebase with such a long legacy is really hard. That said Apple doing their own hardware has always been the ultimate goal. End to end control was always the dream.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>The modern Mac is blazing fast hardware. Ryzen 4000 has something to say about that ;)
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Ryzen 4000 may be blazinger, but that doesn't mean those 10th gen Intel CPUs are slow. I can order a machine that outspecs a MacPro from Dell or Lenovo, but it won't be as tightly integrated as a Mac
jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
With 6/8 threads and a low/mid-end GPU there is nothing "blazing fast" about the hardware. They are common, average components for laptops. The build quality and software is where macOS was always excellent when Jobs was at the helm. Now software is finicky, lacks support for standards and the build quality cannot be trusted as a whole.
- pdpi 6y ago
  > They are common, average components for laptops. The point is precisely that. Average components are blazingly fast these days.
- 6y ago

rbanffy 6y ago

Retina screens mean considerably more work. On Lion you only had a fixed size bitmap that could be moved around easily, but, with a high density screen, you have multiple densities that need to be computed and cached and that take at least 4x more memory. Also, Catalina is doing a lot more work under the hood than Lion. What I saw was not flickering, but that I could move the pointer faster than a bar could be rendered and that the UI opted not to render it in that case. Is that what you refer to?

Hamuko 6y ago
>Retina screens mean considerably more work. On Lion you only had a fixed size bitmap that could be moved around easily Didn't the first retina MacBook Pro ship with Lion?
- rbanffy 6y ago
  I think the first Retinas didn't have fractional scaling. I think it was hard coded at 2x scale. Not sure, though. My 15" presents 5 possible scaling options.
  - grishka 6y ago
    I still use the first-generation retina and it does have the same 5 scaling options.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      With the original OS?
      - grishka 6y ago
        IIRC yes but the scaled options were so laggy they were hardly usable. It improved with updates.
        6y ago

knolan 6y ago

Here is my 16" doing what you suggest: https://imgur.com/v4HNhZY https://imgur.com/v4HNhZY Moving frame to frame you see that the blue highlight lags the mouse by one or two frames. Seems okay to me, I don't see any flickering.

lloeki 6y ago
There is visible flickering during the last second. Moving frame by frame: the blue highlight goes unseen together with Clear History, then it's Settings for This Website, then Hide Others, then Quit Safari twice, the highlight reappears on Hide Safari, then disappears with Clear History. A little bit later Settings for This Website is highlighted but the text stays dark instead of becoming white.
danielscrubs 6y ago
At the 4 sec mark in your video the text "Clear History..." vanishes resulting in flicker. I have a screenshot if you want.
- knolan 6y ago
  I see it now, thanks for pointing it out. Just for fun I recorded it with the 240 fps video mode on my phone and you can see that the text colour is changing from black to white in response to the mouseover but the blue highlight does not always render. Taking a new screen recording I did a quick time-space plot in Matlab. https://imgur.com/a/Pih5Q8m https://imgur.com/a/Pih5Q8m It appears to be an issue when you move your mouse more than one pixel per frame of the refresh rate.
  - danielscrubs 6y ago
    Nice work!
cwhiz 6y ago
Yeah this has got to be peak absurdity. Inspecting menu responsiveness frame by frame.

bob1029 6y ago

This is not just happening to Apple. Every tech giant is losing sight of the fundamental experience over marketable features, shiny and profit. There are a lot of places you could assign blame for this nonsense, but perhaps a better path would be to just start a new company and release products that don't suck. Surely there is at a small, yet viable market out there for "how macbooks used to be prior to 2014". I'd throw my wallet at the first company to produce an exact clone of the late 2013 macbook pro running a non-shit variant of OSX. This is easy money sitting on the table, but there's probably more money in shoving 12 month product cadences down everyone's throats.

chooseaname 6y ago
Wait, why not 2014? I have a mid-2014 13" rMBP and it's pretty great (except MacOS has gotten worse). What changed after 2013?
- bob1029 6y ago
  I actually have no strong opinion regarding the 2014 year. 2013 was just when I happened to step into the store and pick one up. I believe they're pretty close in terms of features/quality.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Well, the last non-shit version of OS X is Mavericks, which came out in 2013. :) (I'm not 100% sure whether the 2014 MBP can run Mavericks, it depends on when exactly in 2014 in was released.)
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    Wrong the last non-shit version is Leopard because I can run it on PPC. You can’t prove me wrong unless you escalate the purity spiral.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Well, for what it's worth, I practice what I preach—I'm typing this on a Hackintosh I purpose-built for Mavericks compatibility in early March. :) But just for fun, if your benchmark is Power PC support then I am delighted to introduce the latest version of OS X that can run on your hardware: newly-PPC-compatible Snow Leopard! https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsuppo...

chooseaname 6y ago

Is this due to Retina Scaling? Have you tried it after using an app like Display Menu to choose a non Retina scaled resolution?

userbinator 6y ago

What you want is lower latency, not necessarily higher throughput. Unfortunately it's not just Apple, it seems newer hardware in general is less responsive: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ The iPhones and iPads are quite good, however, but I suspect it's because Apple specifically optimised them to be.

dx034 6y ago
For me that's one of the major advantages of iPhones over Androids. Android has always had those micro-delays. On a new device in the price range of an iPhone they're acceptable but it's (subjectively) never as smooth as an iPhone. I was always curious if it's closer integration between hardware and software or if Google just doesn't really care about it as it doesn't hurt sales.
- aequitas 6y ago
  I recently switched back from Android to iPhone with the new iPhone SE. I was just blown away with the speed and tactility of the iPhone. Just how the hardware and software work together to make it one experience. Whereas my Android always felt slow and laggy. Granted it was a mid-range one, but still, basic things like opening and switching apps should come with seconds delay and loading times.

aequitas 6y ago

If I remember correctly it was Lion (or Leopard?) that was an actual performance improvement on the previous instalment of Mac OS X. It was just so much notable snappier. Haven't had a single update since then that did the same.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I believe you're thinking of Snow Leopard. Definitely not Lion, which was a somewhat poor release, and not Leopard, which had a lot of performance issues initially. Mountain Lion is also a possible candidate (because it fixed the problems with Lion), or Mavericks if you were on memory-constrained hardware (because it introduced memory compression). But it's probably Snow Leopard.
- jki275 6y ago
  Snow Leopard was essentially a maintenance release, and I think you're correct there with the rest.
- aequitas 6y ago
  You could be correct there with Snow Leopard, definately not Mavericks. It was a release without a lot of new features but more under the hood stuff.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    It really could be Mavericks in that, if you upgraded a machine with 4 GB of memory or less (which were still fairly common at the time!), I'd expect you to see a significant speed improvement. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compre... I've seen this work and it makes a big difference.

ubermonkey 6y ago

That doesn't seem like a reasonable test. I dunno about interface responsiveness, but things I actually want to DO -- server virtualization, Lightroom, etc. -- sure do seem faster on my new rMBP than they did on my 5 year old model.

illumin8 6y ago

I just opened Safari and tried this on my 16" MBP (8-core i9, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) and I don't see any delays or flickering. The menus draw the same as they do on my work 15" MBP (2019, 8-core i9, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD).

hvge 6y ago

This is a weird bug in Catalina, related to an external mouse. If you try the same menu responsivity test with the trackpad, then it’s OK and everything’s instant. Basically, everything you do with the external mouse is sluggish, until you re-login or restart the machine. I blame a memory leak in the WindowServer for it. Once it has over couple of GB allocated RAM, then the mouse is basically unusable. Especially text selection by mouse is a nightmare :)