I watched the recent WWDC keynote where Apple launched a bunch of new products. One of them was the high end mac aimed at the professional sector. This was a computer designed to process hours of high definition video footage for movies/TV. As per usual, they boasted about how many processes you could run at the same time, and how they’d all be done instantaneously, compared to the previous model or the leading competitor.
Meanwhile my 10 year old iMac takes 30 seconds to show the File menu when I click File. Or it takes 5 minutes to run a simple bash command in Terminal. It’s not taking 5 minutes to compile something or do anything particularly difficult. It takes 5 minutes to remember what bash is in the first place.
I know why it couldn’t process video footage without catching fire, but what I truly don’t understand is why it takes so long to do the easiest most mundane things.
I’m not working with 50 apps open, or a browser laden down with 200 tabs. I don’t have intensive image editing software running. There’s no malware either. I’m just trying to use it to do every day tasks. This has happened with every computer I’ve ever owned.
Why?
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>Meanwhile my 10 year old iMac takes 30 seconds to show the File menu when I click File. Or it takes 5 minutes to run a simple bash command in Terminal. It’s not taking 5 minutes to compile something or do anything particularly difficult. It takes 5 minutes to remember what bash is in the first place.
Well, here is the question: is it a 10 year old Mac running 10 year old Mac OS (don’t know what the catchy name of it was at the time, last time I used Mac OS it was Snow Leopard), or is it a 10 year old Mac running the CURRENT Mac OS with all updates installed,.with current versions of programs with all THEIR updates installed?
Operating Systems, as they are iterated year after year, generally add more and more features to create a better user experience and add to the “reason” you should upgrade to the next version, but usually those features require more and more power from the machine, which your machine doesn’t have. This is repeated by many programs, whose developers will say things like “we don’t need to optimize our program to use less than 4GB of Memory when 98% of our userbase has 16; the effort in optimizing is only going to help 2% of our customers”
It’s kind of like asking why a shelf is buckling under the weight of all your books, when it didn’t 10 years ago; 10 years ago you only had 20 books of 100 pages each, while now, as programs have gotten more complex to be more appealing and useful, while you still only have about 23 books, but each one is 5,000 pages.
Now, there CAN be other factors at play here, like viruses or extensions installed you don’t realize are using CPU resources (using the Bookshelf analogy, you or someone else hid a 50 pound dumbbell behind the books you don’t notice), your computer might be self-throttling it’s performance because it’s power supply or parts might not be functioning properly (termites weakening the wood) or other such factors.
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