Processor speed vs. Application speed
Hi. This is my first post here, although I've been reading the forums every day for the past six months or so... ;-) For some reason, I just felt roiled up enough to register as a member and say something about this issue.
I'm really getting frustrated Apple's deceleration of processor speed increases and their tendency, lately, to come out with dreadfully slow applications. I switched to an iMac (Sage) at the beginning of 2001 because I was sick of Microsoft as a company and I was fed up with Windows crashing all the time. At the time, I was happy with the processor speed, and Apple seemed to be keeping up with the Intel, AMD, etc. processors just fine. I also got my iMac because I was looking forward to OS X.
But lately, it's amazing to me how far behind Apple is lagging in processor speed. And what is it with the latest iApps? iCalendar is the slowest application I have ever used on any platform in my life. It nearly choked when I imported three year's worth of events from Palm Desktop. PD zipped along as happy as a honeybee with three years of calendar events (it's ugly compared to iCal, and it doesn't use the iCalendar standard, and it's not a Cocoa app, but at least it's fast). I finally ended up spending about five hours going through all my calendar events from 2000 and 2001 and saving them to their own calendars. Once I archived 2000 and 2001, I saw a dramatic speed increase in iCal, but it's still a slow application even with just a year's worth of events to carry.
I just don't understand what in the world could take an application such a long time to perform the simplest tasks. How can Apple afford to make the slowest applications ever at a time when their processors are the slowest in the business? Why did it take Apple over a year to accelerate OS X's Finder so that it didn't take a full three seconds to move from file to file in icon view using the arrow keys? It just boggles my mind.
Believe it or not from the way I'm ranting, I'm an avid Mac fan. I have no desire to return to "my clunky Windows world," as one of the Switchers says. It burns me, though, when I'm using Word X on my 600 MHz iBook with 384 MB RAM and it's three or four times SLOWER than Word 97 ever was on my old Pentium 125 MHz machine with 128 MB RAM! I mean, why bother having all this processor speed and RAM when applications are slower than ever?
I just don't get it. I love it that my Mac hardly ever crashes, though... and it's gorgeous... and intuitive... etcetera... but, IMHO, Appleand all other software developersshould focus more on application speed than processor speed.