by , 11:15 AM EDT, April 4th, 2001
For some time now, I've been running OS X on my G4 Cube, as well as on
my PowerBook G3 "Wall Street." I've been favorably impressed
with the interface, especially the simplicity and elegance. I am not quite a
Unix "Yoda" yet, but can appreciate the potential. But there has been
one thing that has nagged at the back of my mind for some time -- moreso, now
that I am running Mac OS X 10.0:
Why does OS X run so doggone slow on my Cube?
Before you Cube fans send those flames, hear me out first. I have the good fortune
to play with OS X on a wide variety of machines: for example, at work, we have
a G4 466 MHz with the standard 128 MB of RAM. OS X runs on this machine pretty
much the way I've described it above.
At home, I run it on two machines, the aforementioned PowerBook (233 MHz, 288
MB RAM) and G4 Cube (450 MHz, 30 Gig HD, 768 MB RAM). I expected it to run slow
on the PowerBook, but what has really discouraged me has been the speed on my
$2000 Cube, or, rather, the lack thereof.
What caused me alarm hasn't been the fact that OS X runs slower than expected
on my supposedly high-end machine, but the fact that others have send The Mac
Observer similar comments. The feedback makes a two-fold allegation: 1) that
OS X runs unforgivably slow on the Cube and 2) OS X runs slower on the Cube
than on other machines.
For example, over at Mac OS X.com, someone
posted the following:
UI slow on cube
For some reason, the UI of OS X seems to run faster on my PB G3 300mhz 192mb ram than my cube 450mhz 310mb ram. This puzzles me considering that the PB has a clunky rage pro and the cube has a nice smooth rage 128... but either way i hope apple fixes this
Is this problem isolated to a few people only? Have you or haven't you experienced this as well? If you own or use a G4 Cube running OS X, we'd like to year from you.
We acknowledge that OS X is a work in progress. But if the info that Rodney relays is true, such reports are unacceptable and should be a high priority by the programming team at Apple. This report begs a question: what is the difference between a G4 Cube and any other newer Mac? Until we find the answers, we'd like to have solicit feedback from as many Cube owners as possible. Please use the feedback form below.