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are all macs like this??
- Thread starter olivia
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My local Apple reseller has a much lower rate of foot traffic than even your smallest proper Apple Store, they have both the 1.83GHz and Black MacBooks on display.
Both are stock and both of them absolutely fly when dealing with the Finder, Apple applications and the few Universal apps. They bog right down when dealing with Rosetta as both only have 512MB RAM.
My Dad has a HP laptop, 1.8GHz Pentium M - it runs rings around my iBook and both MacBooks would not only run rings around my Dad's laptop when running Universal apps they would kick it and punch it until it gave up the ghost.
I suspect you may have been dealing with a machine that's had about a year's worth of use in a few months and hasn't had the luxury of a proper restart or even some basic maintenance. Those display models are put through absolute hell you must realise. The MacBooks I have seen are blazingly fast.
Both are stock and both of them absolutely fly when dealing with the Finder, Apple applications and the few Universal apps. They bog right down when dealing with Rosetta as both only have 512MB RAM.
My Dad has a HP laptop, 1.8GHz Pentium M - it runs rings around my iBook and both MacBooks would not only run rings around my Dad's laptop when running Universal apps they would kick it and punch it until it gave up the ghost.
I suspect you may have been dealing with a machine that's had about a year's worth of use in a few months and hasn't had the luxury of a proper restart or even some basic maintenance. Those display models are put through absolute hell you must realise. The MacBooks I have seen are blazingly fast.
The beachball in itself isn't the end of the world - it normally just means the frontmost application (or rather, the application whose window you have the cursor over) is busy doing some time-consuming task without starting a separate thread for it.
Earlier versions of OSX (particularly, 10.0 to 10.2) were very prone to this, but much less so with 10.3 and 10.4. Having insufficient RAM can be a cause of this - I wouldn't buy any Mac with 512MB (or less) of RAM these days, and certainly not a MacBook, where Rosetta and the shared VRAM are going to use even more of your already scarce free memory.
I think a MacBook with 1GB of RAM would be a fine buy.
Earlier versions of OSX (particularly, 10.0 to 10.2) were very prone to this, but much less so with 10.3 and 10.4. Having insufficient RAM can be a cause of this - I wouldn't buy any Mac with 512MB (or less) of RAM these days, and certainly not a MacBook, where Rosetta and the shared VRAM are going to use even more of your already scarce free memory.
I think a MacBook with 1GB of RAM would be a fine buy.
Conspiracy
I remember when I got a G3 iMac in 2000 and it came with 64megs of RAM. That thing crashed all the time (admittedly in OS9) - and all I was doing was surfing the net. I added an extra 256 and then the crashing became rarer. What I don't get is why do we now need such huge amounts of RAM to do basic stuff (using processors that knock the socks off a G3)? Surely 512 is ample to use the internet and type up word docs. I think it's all a con. Apple and other developers deliberately use bloated and overbearing code for new apps and new OSes in order to necessitate the purchase of larger amounts of RAM and get us to spend more money.
(I know I'm being unreasonable, but I'm sure it's a conspiracy!)
I remember when I got a G3 iMac in 2000 and it came with 64megs of RAM. That thing crashed all the time (admittedly in OS9) - and all I was doing was surfing the net. I added an extra 256 and then the crashing became rarer. What I don't get is why do we now need such huge amounts of RAM to do basic stuff (using processors that knock the socks off a G3)? Surely 512 is ample to use the internet and type up word docs. I think it's all a con. Apple and other developers deliberately use bloated and overbearing code for new apps and new OSes in order to necessitate the purchase of larger amounts of RAM and get us to spend more money.
(I know I'm being unreasonable, but I'm sure it's a conspiracy!)
I would check how many apps are running, many windows users think that clicking the red button on the menu bar closes the application, it doesnt, end result is that a ton of applications are still running and tehy take their bit of memory. I would also make sure all the software is 100% up to date, when I got my first powerbook and Office it was slow as hell, ram update helped but the first service pack for office went just as far... just because its on a mac doesnt eliminate the fact that its from M$! 