Newsletter Issue #1032: Too Much Mac?
March 14th, 2022It took several decades for Macs to catch up. I mean, you could type text quickly enough, even if you were a speedy typist. But it would often seem to take forever to save even a small word processing file. Dealing with multimedia files, rendering, converting or saving, sometimes meant long minutes — or hours in some cases.
Apple’s 1994 transition from Motorola 680×0 CPUs to the PowerPC was meant to put your Mac on steroids, more or less, or at least that was the promise. But it took a few years to realize its potential, because apps were slow to update. Thus, you had to run most of your software in emulation, which was actually slower than the previous Macs.
With the arrival of Mac OS X, you’d think a tried and true Unix platform managing the operating system would have meant better performance. But Apple’s focus on eye candy, the legendary Aqua interface, meant that everything proceeding slowly. You’d feel you were stuck in a tub of molasses until Apple sorted things out. In the early days, even hardware acceleration via the graphics card wasn’t supported according to what one Apple developer told me at the time.
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