UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]

Wintel boxes through the 1990s and 2000s coped with a much more diverse range of hardware and related drivers than the Mac ecosystem has ever had, and while certainly there was the occasional glitch, the track record was dramatically better for a very long time than what we see today.

This idea that widespread failures are somehow acceptable and to be expected is a bizarre change in mindset that seems to have taken hold in the 2010s. It is not in any way inevitable. It is just a result of poor specification and standardisation, bad programming, and rushing junk to market for commercial reasons when it isn't up to the standards we used to expect, often with some vague promise that any flaws will be corrected by on-line updates later.

I'm increasingly of the view that the Internet has actually been the worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. It should be a huge advantage, but in reality it is often used as an excuse to ship bad code early and to impose unwanted updates, rent-an-app pricing models, and other user-hostile strategies.

If anyone still made software that does an important job well and comes with meaningful long-term support, my businesses would be throwing so much money at them right now. Sadly, hardly anyone making core business software actually does. It appears that I am part of a small minority, and so many people are willing to accept and pay for substandard junk that this has become the dominant software business model of this decade.

The most frustrating thing is that, since apparently there aren't enough of us for our money to swing things back in a more quality-driven direction, it's not clear what any of us can do constructively to make things any better now. Maybe when things reach their logical conclusion and people are actually dying because some 13-year-old script kiddie accidentally crashed their car by remote control, the wider public will finally get the message and start demanding acceptable quality again.

Verified by observing vm_stat values on my 4GB 'Air and my wife's 8GB 'Air.

Ha! No one cares about desktop any more.

When you're ready you can try Windows 8, a surprisingly mature and stable OS that runs on a hardware ecosystem several orders of magnitude more complex.

You get used to the fact that it was clearly designed to run on a tablet. The metro start page is actually quite good, even on desktop.

But if you were serious, I'd look for a non-prism-compromised OS.

I was a hackintosh user for years. I got an old lenovo from 2007 with an intel core 2 duo and thought it would be fun to install OS X Tiger on it. Install went smoothly except the intel integrated graphics wasn't supported.

I decided to check out System Preferences to see how much had changed in all these years. I immediately noticed this perfectly smooth animation between panels. I couldn't believe it was so slow - and with no graphics driver! So I tried it on my rMBP and it was incredibly laggy. I just quickly recorded it with my phone and thought I'd show just one small part of OS X that really represents a much bigger picture of UI performance regressions.