2:00 a.m. April 19, 2002 PDT
They're here, they're slow, get used to it. At least for now.
One of Apple's top goals for its new flat-panel iMacs is to get home consumers to switch from Windows PCs.
But some who rushed to order the attractive new computer sight unseen say they have been disappointed: For Web browsing -- still the biggest time use of home computers after e-mail -- the new iMacs are notably slower than a PC. Yep, even an older, cheaper one.
Tests conducted by Wired News confirmed reader complaints that a new 800 MHz iMac takes an average of twice as long to render Web pages as a comparable or cheaper PC running Windows XP. Even on broadband networks, the iMac's default Internet Explorer browser took an average of 10 seconds per page to render several popular sites, including CNN.com and the Apple Store homepage.
Slashdot discussion pages and some weblog sites took even longer, despite their lack of fat graphics. The diagnosis: The problem is not a bandwidth issue caused by fat HTML, but an annoying delay in actually drawing the page onscreen after its components have been downloaded.
"I spent $1,800 on a computer that's slower than the $400 eMachine it replaced," one iMac user wrote in an e-mail
Several correspondents asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation by Mac zealots, who have been known to e-mail 1,000 or more harangues to the work addresses of those who criticize the huggable device.
But, still: "I'm sick of looking at that little wheel spin," another griped, referring to the circular hourglass cursor that appears while the Mac processes a Web page.
Tests on other Apple platforms showed a similar performance gap between a $1,500 Dell notebook and a freshly unboxed, $3,000 PowerBook G4.
Switching browsers -- even to the latest version of Opera, the self-styled "world's fastest browser" -- indicated that Mac versions of most browsers are conspicuously slower than their Windows counterparts.
The culprit, it turns out, isn't the new iMac's hardware, but its operating system, which Apple focused on getting to market first and bringing up to speed later. In order to let OS X support as many existing software applications as possible, "Apple supported a number of legacy technologies designed to ease their transition to the new operating system," said Nathalie Welch, the company's public relations manager for hardware.
As a result, Welch said, "We are merely at the beginning of the performance opportunities in Mac OS X."
Jason Hazlett, a Mac developer for Opera, said performance problems are something application developers have to live with at this stage. "To get any application running on OS X is one thing, but getting it to run well is another," he said. "The most important thing to do is to use the OS X native event model. I cannot speak for Internet Explorer, but the Opera beta you are running does not (run the event model). This goes a long way in explaining what you are observing."
Hazlett said that early test versions of Opera's future 6.0 release, which uses OS X native events, are already faster than their predecessors on MacOS 9.2, the previous generation Macintosh operating system still booted by skeptics and late adopters.
Jimmy Grewal, Microsoft's program manager for the Mac version of Internet Explorer, agreed that the problem lies with OS X, not the browser. In particular, he said hardware graphics acceleration was largely missing from OS X at this stage in its development. "The effort of drawing something to the screen (on Windows) can be offloaded to a graphics card, but in OS X the CPU is heavily involved," he said.
Grewal defended Apple's strategy of releasing a slow version of OS X now rather than a faster one later. "That was a conscious decision Apple made," he said. "They optimized for user experience rather than raw performance."
The goal, he said, was to update the Mac's look and feel to the new Aqua interface, while avoiding onscreen glitches and user interface inconsistencies that a hasty excursion into hardware acceleration might have brought. "We think our users wouldn't trade that performance difference for the experience," he said.
And, at least in Wired News tests, OS X didn't mimic 9.2's habit of locking up completely, requiring the Mac's power cord and/or battery to be removed in order to reboot it -– hardly a satisfying user experience.
Apple declined to specify a date or time period when faster browsers or OS X performance enhancements would be available, but Grewal speculated it could take more than a few months. "I think this time next year or in 18 months, Apple will have time to focus on not just porting (i.e., translating software from OS 9 to OS X), but on how they can make the performance better," he said.
In the meantime, at least some owners of the new iMac agree the experience is worth the wait.
J.D. Falk, a 10-year Unix administrator, replaced his home PC with one of the first flat-panel iMacs to leave the warehouse. Falk shrugged off performance problems even after a demo. "I've wanted a Mac for a long time."
