4 ms·

- Lion is very fast with a SSD, but definitely slower than 10.6 with a regular hard disk. Hence the difference in perception between various people. I'd like t

- Lion is very fast with a SSD, but definitely slower than 10.6 with a regular hard disk. Hence the difference in perception between various people. I'd like to see this backed up by numbers. Sure, Lion and Mountain Lion are quite slow on spinning platters, but OS X feels almost an order of magnitude faster since I had an SSD. Much faster than Snow Leopard with a hard disk. The numbers are also on my side, an SSD completely blows away hard disks both in access times and read/write speed. but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors Indeed. Big time. It works ok on the road, but when I have an external screen connected I never use full screen support. It would be easy to make things better: allow users to put another full-screen application (or desktop) on the secondary screen. Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears. I really disliked Lion for all its bugs. But things have been steadily improving since Mountain Lion, to the point where even iMessage works most of the time in 10.8.2 ;).

demallien 14y ago
I think c3d is right in that Lion and Mountain Lion are slower than Snow Leopard if you don't have an SSD. It seems to me that recently Apple have been designing OSX with SSD-equipped computers as the target. They assume that you will have fast read times, and use algorithms to optimise that. For example, they 'deactivate' applications that aren't being used, because they know they can restart them from SSD very quickly, which in turn frees up physical RAM, which speeds the computer up elsewhere. The problem is that if you don't have an SSD, this decision is catastrophic for performance. As always, Apple are skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it is...

demallien 14y ago

I think c3d is right in that Lion and Mountain Lion are slower than Snow Leopard if you don't have an SSD. It seems to me that recently Apple have been designing OSX with SSD-equipped computers as the target. They assume that you will have fast read times, and use algorithms to optimise that. For example, they 'deactivate' applications that aren't being used, because they know they can restart them from SSD very quickly, which in turn frees up physical RAM, which speeds the computer up elsewhere. The problem is that if you don't have an SSD, this decision is catastrophic for performance. As always, Apple are skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it is...