when in the history of computers, was a newer and more versatile version of an operating system EVER faster than the old one?
according to Apple's own advertising, Panther was significantly faster than Jaguar, and Tiger was significantly faster than Panther.
That's correct, I was typing too fast (and thinking too slowly), ;o) what I really should have said was a new MAJOR version. :o) (like 9>X, 95>98 etc). The minor versions of course had optimizations of the same architecture so yes I'd expect them to be faster.
X does have a lot of advantages, but it exerts a heavy load because of the high resolution graphics, and animated tools bars, and bouncing icons etc.
Well yes and no. More detailed graphics only require more CPU power while they are drawn, and since the drawing processes have lowest priority they will hardly slow down the rest of the system while it's being done (however it will indeed _look_ (and hence feel) slower). Animated toolbars and bouncing icons again only require power while bouncing and animating, besides with processors of a few 100 MHz and videocards that can do their own graphics processing, this is already pretty negligeable. It's nothing more than blitting a few bitmaps into video memory.
So yes the fancy graphics make the look&feel slightly slower, but the decrese in real computational power (which we see in less possible tracks with Logic etc) comes from the more complex architecture of OSX. Switching off all fancy graphic things (which in fact you can) doesn't have much influence on that.
And as for that last cause of slowness, I think it's a good thing that new processing power is put to use (the use being the advantages of OSX). If a dual G5 was nothing more than a heavily overclocked classic G3 machine, doing exactly the same stuff but 20 times faster, it would have been a bit of a waste of money. ;o)
Maurits.