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Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

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Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#91

Post by nivla »

coldtea wrote: post #71
pajaroide wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem with additional functionality on a laptop screen?

Nothing. I retroffited a soda fountain on mine.

Well if it as light as the increased weight from the addition of a touchscreen, I wouldn't mind having two!

However on a serious note, its not as bad as you think. Just have to get used to it and once you do that, there won't be a going back. Think of it as something that is supposed to complement your existing workflow and not as something that would replace it. You know like have a voice assistant on your phone, you don't have to yell everything at it, just some quick look ups.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#92

Post by protomyth »

coldtea wrote: post #75
danieltillett wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on how buggy Yosemite is this should really be rephrased as a beta version of Windows runs better than a beta version of MacOS.

How buggy was it, really? I've heard several painful stories, but nothing concrete, except some changes Apple made to the DNS infrastructure. The same kind of stories I've heard for every release since 10.4, about how the new one is so buggy, etc. Then, the next release comes and people wax nostalgically about how stable the previous one was.

I have about 50 to go by and given the stats, it crashes more often than Maverick and much more than Mountain Lion. Wifi is a constant pain (although iOS 8 is much, much worse with about 75% of the iPhones and iPads refusing to work with our Cisco network - no other OS exhibits this randomish behavior).

It also is a memory hog compared to Maverick and earlier. 4GB machines are noticeably sluggish (to the point of user complaints).

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#93

Post by kasabali »

emp_zealoth wrote: post #85
kasabali wrote: post #29

> Here's the real kicker: it's fast. It's smooth. It renders at 60FPS unless you have a lot going on. It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X, further leading me to believe that Apple really needs to overhaul how animations are done. Even when I turn Transparency off in OS X, Mission Control isn't completely smooth. Here, even after some Aero Glass transparency has been added in, everything is smooth. It's…

Well, I'm using Ubuntu/Gnome 3 on both my 6 year old gaming desktop and 4 years old i3/basic discrete AMD GPU laptop and I have to say everything runs extremely smooth and consumes a pittance less than 1GB RAM used with some stuff in the background

Gnome shell is CPU hungry and I can tell I'm not alone with that because I did a lot of google search on it. Even when dragging windows around, CPU usage skyrockets to 40-60% and it's not even smooth. And that's with gpu acceleration, I can't even imagine what would've happened if it were on software rendering. Not to mention memory usage of gnome shell only increases with time.

They are all known issues but shell developers blame proprietary Nvidia driver, maybe that's why you are more happy with gnome shell than I am :) (Though I still can't get how cpu usage skyrockets when dragging windows.)

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#94

Post by geographomics »

acdha wrote: post #62
geographomics wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But OS X literally is a Unix derivative. Its precursor NeXTSTEP was built on top of the Mach kernel and BSD. In comparison, Windows 10 has its roots in the Windows NT lineage (starting with NT 3.1, and including Windows XP), which is separate from the DOS-derived Windows line that ended with Windows ME. (That said, I agree that he was just trolling.)

I don't disagree that it's a Unix – Apple even got it certified in years past – but it's not that simple: Mach is not a Unix kernel and the Mach interfaces percolate up to the higher levels for many tasks which aren't covered by the POSIX layers. The bigger difference, though, is higher up. While you certainly can compile POSIX code on OS X, most of the applications which people run use Cocoa and that owes far more t…

That's an interesting point, and indeed NT has a curious history in that regard - Microsoft was originally planning an OS/2-based API as the dominant one, and it was only due to the success of Windows 3.0 that they ended up adapting the Windows API to 32 bits.

Microsoft has always been dominated by backwards compatibility constraints so there probably wasn't much scope for a massive redesign of the API, as it was in their best commercial interests for 16 and 32 bit Windows APIs to match as closely as possible, to ease porting of third party software.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#95

Post by nbevans »

acdha wrote: post #62
geographomics wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But OS X literally is a Unix derivative. Its precursor NeXTSTEP was built on top of the Mach kernel and BSD. In comparison, Windows 10 has its roots in the Windows NT lineage (starting with NT 3.1, and including Windows XP), which is separate from the DOS-derived Windows line that ended with Windows ME. (That said, I agree that he was just trolling.)

I don't disagree that it's a Unix – Apple even got it certified in years past – but it's not that simple: Mach is not a Unix kernel and the Mach interfaces percolate up to the higher levels for many tasks which aren't covered by the POSIX layers. The bigger difference, though, is higher up. While you certainly can compile POSIX code on OS X, most of the applications which people run use Cocoa and that owes far more t…

This post backs up the statement you hated so much though. That OSX is just a mod of various components plus an old era Unix kernel at the core. You literally validated the point.

OSX is a strange OS to use. It looks and feels good at first glance but when you have used it for a year, one really longs to return to a pure Windows environment. OSX has weird bugs like the beachball cursor which is something that simply shouldn't happen in a modern OS. The last Windows to have a global lock like that was 9x.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#96

Post by ChuckMcM »

Interesting read. And one takeaway is that someone is missing out on a huge opportunity with the trackpad driver :-) But the really interesting thing is the software vs hardware design challenge at Apple. From a revenue standpoint MacOS is really a small business at Apple, but its Microsoft's "iPhone" (aka one of their main revenue drivers), so it isn't surprising that Microsoft is investing more than Apple in that space.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#97

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

FreakyT wrote: post #50
edandersen wrote: post #17

Macs really are some of the best Windows laptops you can buy - and now with full UEFI support Windows boots as fast as OS X.

Completely disagree -- the Apple trackpad drivers on windows are awful, and on a laptop, most of your time will probably be spent using a trackpad. Trackpad++, which the author of the article mentions, can help, but it's a horrible program for the following reasons: 1. The developer requires that you put windows into "test mode" (creating a non-removable desktop watermark) to install it at all, apparently to get arou…

Apple's keyboard layout for a Boot Camp lacks some of the accents with alt+ - the basic stuff works, but anything non-ASCII or a dead key is broken. :(

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#98

Post by captainmuon »

coldtea wrote: post #67
sheng wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean and the amusing thing is that it used to be the other way around. Back then in the older days of Gnome2 and KDE3 it was possible to use them with other window managers like Beryl and Compiz. These again also provided a 3D desktop experience and in their later development stage they were well optimized and stable. They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness…

> They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness, resource consumption and hardware support. Beryl and Compiz? I beg to differ. Besides a bitch to get running, and get running well, they were not at all comparable to Vista with regards to "resource consumption" and "hardware support".

This is just an anecdote, but I share the parent's experience, too. I bought a low-end HP laptop around when Vista came out (2006/07?). It ran with Aero Glass, but not very smoothly. But first compiz-quinn and then beryl worked perfectly, also with the same blurred transparency effect that was slow on Windows. Even when I enabled the crazier effects like wobbly windows, it remained smooth, and used not noticably more resources. The only place a slowness was noticable was when quickly scrolling (webpages, for instance). However, this is still a problem on any non-Windows compositing DE in my experience.

At some point, "they" started to rewrite compiz, and it went downhill, until it was so slow I could not use compositing anymore.

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#99

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

neovive wrote: post #42

Windows 8.1 runs quite smoothly on my 2 year old Mac Mini via Bootcamp. However, I do have problems runs Steam games from Windows due to the lack of a dedicated DirectX video card. I use the setup mostly for testing and for playing Project Spark. Does anyone know if the dedicated video card on the latest Macbook Pro supports DirectX games? Also, I think he meant to say "Cmd+Shift+4" as the OS X screenshot shortcut or…

It supports DirectX fine, Macs use regular GPUs. Did you not install the drivers?

Re: Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

#100

Post by nimish »

Aleman360 wrote: post #72
kasabali wrote: post #29

> Here's the real kicker: it's fast. It's smooth. It renders at 60FPS unless you have a lot going on. It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X, further leading me to believe that Apple really needs to overhaul how animations are done. Even when I turn Transparency off in OS X, Mission Control isn't completely smooth. Here, even after some Aero Glass transparency has been added in, everything is smooth. It's…

And guess what... We're using the same tools available to third party app developers, in an effort to ensure the dev platform is rock solid. The Start menu is just a universal XAML app. We don't have to do any special optimization on top of what the framework offers. Disclaimer: Microsoft employee working on the Windows 10 Start menu.

Well it does help that you can just email the perf people in devdiv and have the single largest concentration of low level windows performance experts available for free

The start menu is great code but mom and pop dev shop doesn't have hundreds of top devs available :)

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