Cool Mac Gear

Odessey reader Patrick Taw writes:

This is a never-ending debate. There’s an old saying: “If I have to explain it to you, you’ll never understand anyway.” If Patrick’s friends have actually tried using a decently fast Mac running OS X long enough to get past the initial unfamiliarity issues, and they still prefer Windows, well, there’s no accounting for taste.

I’m not a gamer, and for all I know, Windows PCs may well be objectively superior gaming machines in terms of hardware performance as well as an indisputably greater selection of gaming software. I suppose that some people actually do buy computers primarily to play games on, and the point about Quartz Extreme dumping some of the Finder video processing load onto the video card probably holds some water in that context. Many games, as I understand it, will eat up all the video processing power you have available and look for more.

However, for other sorts of computing, the point of Quartz Extreme is to speed things up. If a supported Graphics Processor Unit is installed (IE RADEON or NVIDIA GeForce with at least 16 MB of VRAM), Mac OS X v10.2 automatically enables Quartz Extreme which moves the Quartz Compositor from the CPU to the GPU. This allows the CPU(s) to focus on application-specific needs. As a result, the entire system feels faster and more responsive when Quartz Extreme is enabled, and CPU use drops dramatically. Applications draw windows into source buffers. The Quartz Compositor assigns each window to a separate layer, arranges then flattens (composites) the layers, and pushes each scene through the graphics card to the display.

Now it can of course be argued that without the Quartz graphics in OS X, everything would be faster. And if your aunt had cojones, she’d be your uncle. I have personally suggested that it would be nice if there were an alternate GUI with much more modest graphics features available in OS X for folks with older, less powerful computers. My biggest complaint about OS X is its sluggish performance on my 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook (which does not support Qiartz Extreme), but with my 700 MHz iBook, which does support QE, things are significantly livelier, and it’s still just a G3 with a RADEON 7500 GPU and 16 MB of VRAM.

Visuals have always been a significant part of the Mac computing experience. As Apple puts it:

“Quartz Extreme delivers incredible real-time graphics performance that creates new avenues for innovation. Today the technology delivers raw performance gains that empower software developers, including Apple, to rethink the term ‘user experience’ and design entirely new classes of applications based on Quartz Extreme. With Quartz Extreme, the traditional distinctions between 2D, 3D, and dynamic media continue to fade. Additional performance improvements.”

And it will only get better as Macs get faster and more of the potential of Quartz is realized.

If Patrick’s friends don’t care about any of that, and for example are happy using the lame image editing applications that come bundled with their peripherals instead of elegant, integrated iPhoto, perhaps they are better off in Windows, but their preference means only that the PC is a better platform for their particular tastes (eg: gaming) -- not that everyone who uses a Mac is an idiot. Different is neither objectively better nor worse, it just emphasizes other priorities.

Patrick might refer his Mac-basing buddies to an in-depth article posted this week by Steven Garrity, graphics designer at ActsofVolition, who writes: “I’ve been conducting a user interface experiment with myself as the subject. A long-time Windows user and armchair graphical user interface critic, I have spent a week working in Mac OS X. What follows is my review of the experience.”

Now this wasn’t a test configured would show OS X in it’s best light, because the Mac Stephen used was an ancient iMac, with a 400MHz G3 processor, 192 MB of RAM, and running OS X 10.2.5. Given that my Pismo has a 500 MHz G3 processor, 640 MB of RAM, and I still find it more than a bit sluggish, that creaky old iMac would be a recipe for OS X frustration, but to his credit, Stephen acknowledges that it was “Not the latest and greatest hardware - and it showed - but it was sufficient for most work.”

It’s a long article, and I’m not going to attempt to summarize the many points and issues covered, but the interesting thing is that after giving OS X a fair trial even on woefully inadequate hardware, Stephen concluded:

Patrick; tell your friends to at least give a Mac a fair workout before passing judgment.

Charles W. Moore