Mac OS X 10.1 Update--How Fast Is It?

The latest Mac OS X Update, v10.1, was released by Apple last Tuesday at the Seybold SF 2001 conference. We have installed 10.1 on many different Macs with no problems and no new issues have cropped up so far. We do not know if 10.1 fixed the disappearing cursor issue but we have not yet experienced it. So far we've also not experienced the annoying repeating key issue that still happened in 10.0.4.

Of course, the principal complaint when Mac OS X first came out March 24th was that the Finder operations were much too slow, principally launching applications and resizing windows. The Finder is obviously much faster in 10.1 than in previous versions of Mac OS X. Application launch times are rapid and window resizing is nearly real time, less so on our 400 MHz G3 iMac and more so on our Power Mac G4 533DP. Still we timed application launches for a number of Classic, Carbon and Cocoa applications in Mac OS X 10.1 as we did for 10.0, 10.0.1, 10.0.2, 10.0.3 and 10.0.4 on our 450 MHz G4 Cube. Each new version was more or less faster than the one before. So how does 10.1 measure up against the clock? Here are the results:

450 MHz G4 Cube Average Launch Times in Full Seconds

Application	10.0	10.0.1	10.0.2	10.0.3	10.04	10.1
Startup Chime to Login	-	-	-	-	96	68
Login to Desktop	-	-	-	-	20	9
Shutdown	-	-	-	-	-	4
Classic Mode	-	-	-	53	40	46
Netscape 4.77	7	6	4	3	4	2
Word 2001	5	4	2	2	2	-
Scroll in Acrobat 5	-	-	-	72	69	82
AppleWorks 6.1b	-	-	6	5	6	-
- v 6.2	-	-	-	-	-	2
IE 5.1	9	10	8	8	-	-
- v 5.1.1	-	-	-	8	9	-
- v 5.1.2	-	-	-	-	-	2
OmniWeb 4.0cf3	14	13	-	-	-	-
- v 4.0rc1	-	-	9	9	-	-
- v 4.0	-	-	-	11	-	-
- v 4.0.1	-	-	-	13	10	-
- v 4.0.5	-	-	-	-	-	3
Mail	4	4	4	4	7	1
System Preferences	3	2	2	2	3	1

We only began measuring the startup speed with v10.0.4. It was really slow, taking nearly 2 minutes to get to the desktop. 10.1 is much faster taking a little over a minute. The times above are with the Cube connected to a network with AppleTalk enabled. If AppleTalk is turned off and TCP set to manual with the network disconnected, the time to the login window drops from 88 seconds in 10.0.4 to 60 seconds in 10.1. After our 10.0.4 results on boot time were posted, some people suggested some of the extra time might be due to RAM checking during boot since we had 448 MB of RAM. We pulled out all but 128 MB RAM and the boot time remained unchanged.

Launching Classic mode from a fully launched 10.1 was 6 seconds slower on average than with 10.0.4. We are not certain if this is due to Mac OS 9.2.1 or Mac OS X 10.1 since previous measurements used Mac OS 9.1. In addition, scrolling through the 144-page Virtual PC 4.0 Manual as a PDF file with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 was significantly slower. We have no measurements but back us up but 10.1 seems slower using applications that 10.0.4 on our PowerBook G4. One thing that is definitely and consistently much slower is opening emails with HTML in Mac OS X Mail.

Finally, opening applications in the Finder is lightning fast, taking only a few seconds for the longest and right at a second for many. Even the first launch times (as opposed to an average of three times shown in the table above) for the web browsers were only 5-6 seconds.