4 ms·

That is WILD that Windows 11 runs faster than the machine's native OS... Could this suggest that modern Windows is, dare I say it, MORE resource efficient than

That is WILD that Windows 11 runs faster than the machine's native OS... Could this suggest that modern Windows is, dare I say it, MORE resource efficient than modern macOS?! That feels like a ludicrous statement to type, but the results seem to suggest as much.

iforgot22 2y ago
Modern macOS might be optimized for Apple Silicon CPUs. But even when it was Intel only, there were probably times when Windows was lighter, albeit bad in other ways.
- p_ing 2y ago
  It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature. And on ARM it wastes memory due to its 16KiB pages.
  - ryao 2y ago
    Neither of them use microkernels. They are monolithic kernels with loadable module support ("hybrid" kernels). The cores of both Windows NT and XNU were originally microkernels, but then they put all of the servers into the kernel address space to make them into the monolithic kernels that they are today.
    - iforgot22 2y ago
      XNU apparently stands for "X is not Unix." Well that's confusing.
      - ryao 2y ago
        It actually was a recursive acronym that stood for XNU is Not UNIX. Then at some point Apple got it UNIX certified as part of MacOS.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
    > It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature. Yawn. Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family ? Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode ? (Wenn man keine Ahnung hat...)
    - p_ing 2y ago
      You're comparing a modern microkernel to something originating from the 80s? Keep your rude attitude to yourself.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
        It's from 1993. Also be more precise about what exactly you are meaning by writing "It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature." Otherwise don't be offended when people are offended by regurgitated and meanwhile disproven non-sense. kthxbye
        iforgot22 2y ago
        Why is this convo about kernels so angry? And macOS isn't even based on a microkernel.
        LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
        i forgot ;)
jamesy0ung 2y ago
I'm just as surprised. Also, I was using Windows 11 LTSC 2024, not the standard version, which could impact the validity of my comparison.
imglorp 2y ago
The pessimistic viewpoint is the hardware vendor would not mind if you felt your machine was slow and were motivated to upgrade to the latest model every year. The fact that they also control the OS means they have means, motive and opportunity to slow older models if their shareholders demanded.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  Or they simply keep supporting old models with new versions of the OS, even though newer software versions are optimized, and contain new features, enabled by newer hardware improvements. If you machines have more RAM, you can use a more RAM intensive solution to speed many things up, or deliver a more computationally intensive but higher quality solution, or simply add a new previous challenging feature. What would be interesting, is how fast to old but high spec'd models slow down. What slow downs are from optimizing for newer architectures, vs. optimizing with expectation of higher resources.
  - jamesy0ung 2y ago
    The problem seems to be CPU bound, it's got 16GB of memory and memory pressure is low. The CPU is a i7-7820HQ, though I thought that it was interesting that my iPhone XR (Apple A12) scores higher on a synthetic benchmark than my top of the line MacBook Pro from the same time.
taurknaut 2y ago
This doesn't feel terribly surprising to me. MacOS has always had impressively performant parts, but their upgrades always generally lower responsiveness. On modern hardware it's less perceptible obviously, and they want to sell machines, not software. But the last iteration that felt like it prioritized performance and snappiness was Snow Leopard, now twenty years ago. I will say the problem was a lot worse before the core explosion. It was easy for a single process to bring the entire system to a drag. These days the computer is a lot better at adapting to variable loads. I love my macs, and I'm about 10x as productive as on a windows machine after decades of daily usage (and probably a good 2x compared to linux). Performance, however, is not a good reason to use macos—it's the fact that the keybindings make sense and are coherent across an entire OS. You can use readline (emacs) bindings in any text field across the OS. And generally speaking, problems have a single solution that's relatively easy to google for. Bad-behaved apps aside (looking at you zoom and adobe) administering a mac is straightforward to reason about, and for the most part it's easy to ignore the app store, download apps, and run them by double clicking. I love linux, but I will absolutely pay to not have to deal with X11 or Wayland for my day-to-day work. I also expect my employer to pay for this or manage my machine for me. I tried linux full-time for a year on a thinkpad and never want to go back. The only time that worked for me was working at google when someone else broadly managed my OS. macs the only unix I've ever used that felt designed around making my life easier and allowing me to focus on the work I want to do. Linux has made great strides in the last two decades but the two major changes, systemd and wayland, both indicate that the community is solving different problems than will get me to use it as a desktop. Which is fine; I prefer the mac-style to the ibm pc-style they're successfully replacing. Like KDE is very nice and usable, but it models the computer and documents and apps in a completely different way than I am used to or want to use.
- jamesy0ung 2y ago
  I love Linux and run it on my servers, but on the desktop, it requires too much tinkering—I often spend more time troubleshooting than working. Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life. Windows is a mess—I hate the ads, bloat, and lack of a Unix-like environment. WSL2 works but feels like a hack. macOS, on the other hand, gives me full compatibility with Unix tools while also running Office and Adobe apps. Also Command+C for copy, Command+V for paste is much nicer than Control+Shift+C and Control+Shift+V. macOS does have absolutely terrible screen snapping though in comparison to Windows 11. The hardware is solid—great screen, trackpad, speakers, and battery life. I considered getting a high-end PC laptop (based on Rtings’ recommendations), but every option had compromises, either a terrible screen, terrible processor or terrible battery life. By the time I configured it to a non crappy config, it would’ve cost more than a MacBook Pro 16.
bboygravity 2y ago
My first thought is that Apple is throttling performance of older machines on purpose (again). As they did with the phones. Would explain why Windows runs faster.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  > My first thought is that Apple is throttling performance of older machines on purpose (again). The battery life argument was relevant, but where one sits on the issue is going to depend on the poison one picked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

iforgot22 2y ago

Modern macOS might be optimized for Apple Silicon CPUs. But even when it was Intel only, there were probably times when Windows was lighter, albeit bad in other ways.

p_ing 2y ago
It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature. And on ARM it wastes memory due to its 16KiB pages.
- ryao 2y ago
  Neither of them use microkernels. They are monolithic kernels with loadable module support ("hybrid" kernels). The cores of both Windows NT and XNU were originally microkernels, but then they put all of the servers into the kernel address space to make them into the monolithic kernels that they are today.
  - iforgot22 2y ago
    XNU apparently stands for "X is not Unix." Well that's confusing.
    - ryao 2y ago
      It actually was a recursive acronym that stood for XNU is Not UNIX. Then at some point Apple got it UNIX certified as part of MacOS.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  > It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature. Yawn. Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family ? Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode ? (Wenn man keine Ahnung hat...)
  - p_ing 2y ago
    You're comparing a modern microkernel to something originating from the 80s? Keep your rude attitude to yourself.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
      It's from 1993. Also be more precise about what exactly you are meaning by writing "It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature." Otherwise don't be offended when people are offended by regurgitated and meanwhile disproven non-sense. kthxbye
      - iforgot22 2y ago
        Why is this convo about kernels so angry? And macOS isn't even based on a microkernel.
        LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
        i forgot ;)

jamesy0ung 2y ago

I'm just as surprised. Also, I was using Windows 11 LTSC 2024, not the standard version, which could impact the validity of my comparison.

imglorp 2y ago

The pessimistic viewpoint is the hardware vendor would not mind if you felt your machine was slow and were motivated to upgrade to the latest model every year. The fact that they also control the OS means they have means, motive and opportunity to slow older models if their shareholders demanded.

Nevermark 2y ago
Or they simply keep supporting old models with new versions of the OS, even though newer software versions are optimized, and contain new features, enabled by newer hardware improvements. If you machines have more RAM, you can use a more RAM intensive solution to speed many things up, or deliver a more computationally intensive but higher quality solution, or simply add a new previous challenging feature. What would be interesting, is how fast to old but high spec'd models slow down. What slow downs are from optimizing for newer architectures, vs. optimizing with expectation of higher resources.
- jamesy0ung 2y ago
  The problem seems to be CPU bound, it's got 16GB of memory and memory pressure is low. The CPU is a i7-7820HQ, though I thought that it was interesting that my iPhone XR (Apple A12) scores higher on a synthetic benchmark than my top of the line MacBook Pro from the same time.

taurknaut 2y ago

This doesn't feel terribly surprising to me. MacOS has always had impressively performant parts, but their upgrades always generally lower responsiveness. On modern hardware it's less perceptible obviously, and they want to sell machines, not software. But the last iteration that felt like it prioritized performance and snappiness was Snow Leopard, now twenty years ago. I will say the problem was a lot worse before the core explosion. It was easy for a single process to bring the entire system to a drag. These days the computer is a lot better at adapting to variable loads. I love my macs, and I'm about 10x as productive as on a windows machine after decades of daily usage (and probably a good 2x compared to linux). Performance, however, is not a good reason to use macos—it's the fact that the keybindings make sense and are coherent across an entire OS. You can use readline (emacs) bindings in any text field across the OS. And generally speaking, problems have a single solution that's relatively easy to google for. Bad-behaved apps aside (looking at you zoom and adobe) administering a mac is straightforward to reason about, and for the most part it's easy to ignore the app store, download apps, and run them by double clicking. I love linux, but I will absolutely pay to not have to deal with X11 or Wayland for my day-to-day work. I also expect my employer to pay for this or manage my machine for me. I tried linux full-time for a year on a thinkpad and never want to go back. The only time that worked for me was working at google when someone else broadly managed my OS. macs the only unix I've ever used that felt designed around making my life easier and allowing me to focus on the work I want to do. Linux has made great strides in the last two decades but the two major changes, systemd and wayland, both indicate that the community is solving different problems than will get me to use it as a desktop. Which is fine; I prefer the mac-style to the ibm pc-style they're successfully replacing. Like KDE is very nice and usable, but it models the computer and documents and apps in a completely different way than I am used to or want to use.

jamesy0ung 2y ago
I love Linux and run it on my servers, but on the desktop, it requires too much tinkering—I often spend more time troubleshooting than working. Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life. Windows is a mess—I hate the ads, bloat, and lack of a Unix-like environment. WSL2 works but feels like a hack. macOS, on the other hand, gives me full compatibility with Unix tools while also running Office and Adobe apps. Also Command+C for copy, Command+V for paste is much nicer than Control+Shift+C and Control+Shift+V. macOS does have absolutely terrible screen snapping though in comparison to Windows 11. The hardware is solid—great screen, trackpad, speakers, and battery life. I considered getting a high-end PC laptop (based on Rtings’ recommendations), but every option had compromises, either a terrible screen, terrible processor or terrible battery life. By the time I configured it to a non crappy config, it would’ve cost more than a MacBook Pro 16.

bboygravity 2y ago

My first thought is that Apple is throttling performance of older machines on purpose (again). As they did with the phones. Would explain why Windows runs faster.

lostlogin 2y ago
> My first thought is that Apple is throttling performance of older machines on purpose (again). The battery life argument was relevant, but where one sits on the issue is going to depend on the poison one picked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]