Robert asks “How does one measure speed? Is measured by clock speed? Could it be that one’s perspective of speed is relative?”
Of course my comments were based on my perception. The only thing I really have to meaure against is the machines I have. When I switch from OS 9.2 to OS X on the same 733 Mhz G4, bootup and application launches both seem considerably slower to me. Can’t quantify it. Most of what I do is web based, Frontier website management, email, etc. No heavy graphics, page layout or anything. Of course, I should add that I’ve had increasingly frustrating crashes with 9.2, whereas I’ve had none with OS X at all. But then, I don’t have Carbon versions of anything I use besides Frontier and MS/IE either.
The hard drive died in one of our professors’ iMacs a few weeks ago. I had to loan him an old PowerMac 7200 for a few weeks, and when he got his iMac back he thanked me profusely for making it so much faster than it had been. Of course it hadn’t gotten any faster, he just got used to the sluggishness of the 7200, and had forgotten how much quicker the iMac was.
The main thing keeping me from using OS X is lack of a Hawaiian keyboard. Plus according to the Apple teams we’re going to have to migrate from our custom 8 bit fonts to Unicode. It’s going to be a long and painful transition, I’m afraid.
