Still, El Capitan is too heavy... will Sierra be any different?

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

I know I should try the betas, but I'm just going to wait for the final product, once all the apparently horrendous bugs are worked out.

That being said, I'm still curious as to how this OS is going to run when fully released. When I first jumped from Mountain Lion to El Capitan, I thought it seemed pretty much as responsive as Mountain Lion. (This was on my 2006 Mac Pro w/ El Capitan workaround and an SSD.) And, now, with a 2009 Mac Pro, I've found it obviously even more responsive... but that still doesn't cut it.

After going back and using Mountain Lion on the 2006 Mac Pro (old clone on some old, clunky HDD), I realized how much lighter the UI is. Finder, for example, opens as quickly as a hidden Text Edit document, and System Prefs opens instantly - and this is with a poor old HDD. Go over to my 2009 Mac Pro, with El Capitan and two SSDs set in RAID 0, Finder has a delay upon opening, and the menus in Finder are just choppy in general. System Prefs opens pretty quickly, but not in the instantaneous way that it opens in Mountain Lion.

All of these smaller UI animations and general system tasks are just plain SLOWER. What gives? Do I seriously have to have a PCIe-SSD to bring up a Finder window like it should? And I doubt that, even then, it will be as quick as Mtn. Lion brings it up - on an old HDD.



I'm waiting for Apple to hopefully get their stuff together and fix this mess. As much as a despise Sierra for being the bane of several capable Macs' existences, I'll be interested in it - BUT only if its UI is efficient. If I had my ways, Apple would still be on Mavericks, for crying out loud.

 

[ActionableMango]

Finder is commonly regarded as a piece of junk that Apple needs to throw out and rewrite from scratch. I don't think that Finder should be representative of the OS as a whole.

For example over in the FCPx benchmarking thread we've discovered that El Capitan reduces rendering times by half on the same hardware. That's a massive improvement for just an OS update.

 

[pigsyn]

Unfortunately no, I installed PB2 weeks ago and Sierra will not be more responsive.
If you're using firefox like me with 114 tabs open, you will suffer

Finder is commonly regarded as a piece of junk that Apple needs to throw out and rewrite from scratch. I don't think that Finder should be representative of the OS as a whole.

For example over in the FCPx benchmarking thread we've discovered that El Capitan reduces rendering times by half on the same hardware. That's a massive improvement for just an OS update.

Can you provide me a link for that ?

 

[ActionableMango]

Can you provide me a link for that ?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/fcpx-amd-vs-nvidia.1956128/

 

[CapnDavey]

I've been running the beta4 for about a week on my 4,1 some issues I ported all my software from a Yosemite install. Just testing now google chrome has some issues but so far everything else seems to work fine. And its faster than I thought it would be

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

Finder and other aspects of the UI in versions like Mtn. Lion were so much faster. Everything is snappy on a crappy old HDD; yet, under El Capitan, and with two SSDs in RAID 0, I still can't get certain things to be as snappy. (Oh, and this is with the use of a much better Mac Pro that also has eight times the RAM.)

 

[filmak]

Finder and other aspects of the UI in versions like Mtn. Lion were so much faster. Everything is snappy on a crappy old HDD; yet, under El Capitan, and with two SSDs in RAID 0, I still can't get certain things to be as snappy. (Oh, and this is with the use of a much better Mac Pro that also has eight times the RAM.)

Is there any chance that this may be a GPU issue? (old card, underpowered, bad drivers... etc)

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

I extensively tested the Finder's degrading performance. Last year when El Capitan was being hyped I posted side by side videos of the El Cap Finder against older versions and Windows File Explorer.

The Finder was fastest around the time of Snow Leopard. Windows Explorer simply trounced the current Finder by up to 10X faster at opening or previewing very large TIFFs. In fact, the Finder at times would simply give up on thumbnail previews if there was too much data in a folder.

If anyone has recently used Macs on a corporate network to access or open big libraries of large media images, you most likely would have seen employees head butting their desks at the terrible bugs and wait times. Just last week our IT guys had to simply delete and recreate my user account because I couldn't see anything in the Finder. Folders would take ages and ages to display even the lightest content. I had to keep force quitting the Finder to see files, but that only worked for a few minutes at a time.

When Jobs died the Finder took a big nose dive soon after. It has become progressively worse as Apple concentrates on consumer devices and less on workstation users. Jobs was very adamant that workstation users should be supported. The tower was his baby, the trash can was not. Annually he was very proud to show off the Finder's performance. Now Apple wants to talk about paying for **** with your blocky watch.

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

Is there any chance that this may be a GPU issue? (old card, underpowered, bad drivers... etc)

Well, I've used El Cap on three different machines, with four different GPUs; and I've also used Mountain Lion with these machines/GPUs. Mountain Lion is much lighter in the ways previously explained. Also, even on my mom's new 5K iMac, Finder takes longer to come up, and other aspects of the OS are heavier when they don't need to be. Looks like Mountain Lion/Mavericks was the sweet spot of modern Mac OS's.

 

[Larry-K]

If things are slow in Sierra, you can ask Siri why.

 

[Bollockser]

My biggest issue has been the ridiculously slow shutdown and restart times. Sometimes it's almost a minute, on a 2012 quad i7 Mac Mini w/SSD and 16GB RAM.

 

[Larry-K]

My biggest issue has been the ridiculously slow shutdown and restart times. Sometimes it's almost a minute, on a 2012 quad i7 Mac Mini w/SSD and 16GB RAM.

That's ridiculous with an SSD.

I've got the same setup, and I'm putting Mavericks on mine right now, just because of that and some software incompatibilities.

I'll put it on in a couple of years, when it seems fast compared to whatever they've cooked up by then (OSX Death Valley?).

 

[goMac]

Sierra does have some new optimizations around responsiveness if you're on newer hardware.

 

[filmak]

Well, I've used El Cap on three different machines, with four different GPUs; and I've also used Mountain Lion with these machines/GPUs. Mountain Lion is much lighter in the ways previously explained. Also, even on my mom's new 5K iMac, Finder takes longer to come up, and other aspects of the OS are heavier when they don't need to be. Looks like Mountain Lion/Mavericks was the sweet spot of modern Mac OS's.

I haven't done any comparison lately, so thanks for your info.
I have also noticed that Finder has issues in 10.11 and of course it seems heavier in general. For a moment I thought that this may be an issue with the older hardware not being well supported (like the bottlenecs in 3,1 GPU performance after mountain lion) but you wrote that you have noticed the same behavior with a new 5k iMac...

Anyway, imho, I think that the OS X (macOS now) has a noticed detoriation in quality as of lately. The yearly cycle has a great influence in this issue as it stopped a lot of the OS refinement, at least as we knew it in the past (i.e. leopard/snow leopard, lion/mountain lion etc) now the most of the interest is about adding more support/features for iOS things and services, not to mention the lower quality of some of the current Applications (and the decrease of functionality for some of them too) like, Airport utility (vs the old one), Disk utility, Mail, App store, iTunes etc.

MacOs is still very nice in general, but unfortunately it has taken the route of the Mac line, now it is like a poor relative of the wealthy iOS family... but we will see how things will evolve.
Cheers!

 

[Larry-K]

Sierra does have some new optimizations around responsiveness if you're on newer hardware.

Too bad Apple doesn't make newer hardware.

 

[ScottishCaptain]

I don't think anything is going to change until Apple gets rid of that god awful blurred glass transparency everywhere. It's pure fashion over form. You don't need it to interact with your files, but it's there anyways. For such a "minimal" GUI, everything about the post Mavericks stuff is extremely pretentious and incredibly obnoxious.

Somewhat off topic, but I had the pleasure of dealing with some older systems this week. One was running BeOS R5 Professional, and the other was running OS/2 Warp 4.5 (eBusiness Server if I recall correctly). They were mid-teir systems back in their day. The BeOS box had two Pentium 3 processors in it (~500mhz), the OS/2 box had four Pentium Pro CPUs in it.

In both cases, I was absolutely shocked at how responsive the systems felt. Especially BeOS. That thing absolutely flew. OS/2 wasn't too bad either. Of course, the complete and utter lack of superfluous animations and design ******** helped a lot. I'd kinda forgotten what it felt like to sit infront of a system that expected you to know what you were doing and do what you told it to do without question. It was just me and the machines, with nothing else to get in the way.

Modern day software kinda sucks. It's no longer about building computers that let you do everything. It's all about building computers that do everything for you, whether you want them to or not.

-SC

 

[loby]

If things are slow in Sierra, you can ask Siri why.

Or Cortana when you switch girlfriends.
[doublepost=1471767261][/doublepost]

I don't think anything is going to change until Apple gets rid of that god awful blurred glass transparency everywhere. It's pure fashion over form. You don't need it to interact with your files, but it's there anyways. For such a "minimal" GUI, everything about the post Mavericks stuff is extremely pretentious and incredibly obnoxious.

Somewhat off topic, but I had the pleasure of dealing with some older systems this week. One was running BeOS R5 Professional, and the other was running OS/2 Warp 4.5 (eBusiness Server if I recall correctly). They were mid-teir systems back in their day. The BeOS box had two Pentium 3 processors in it (~500mhz), the OS/2 box had four Pentium Pro CPUs in it.

In both cases, I was absolutely shocked at how responsive the systems felt. Especially BeOS. That thing absolutely flew. OS/2 wasn't too bad either. Of course, the complete and utter lack of superfluous animations and design ******** helped a lot. I'd kinda forgotten what it felt like to sit infront of a system that expected you to know what you were doing and do what you told it to do without question. It was just me and the machines, with nothing else to get in the way.

Modern day software kinda sucks. It's no longer about building computers that let you do everything. It's all about building computers that do everything for you, whether you want them to or not.

-SC

Not just doing everything for you, but making it so you no longer think. When that happens you are easier to control...don't we see that happening now?

 

[phrehdd]

I don't think anything is going to change until Apple gets rid of that god awful blurred glass transparency everywhere. It's pure fashion over form. You don't need it to interact with your files, but it's there anyways. For such a "minimal" GUI, everything about the post Mavericks stuff is extremely pretentious and incredibly obnoxious.

Somewhat off topic, but I had the pleasure of dealing with some older systems this week. One was running BeOS R5 Professional, and the other was running OS/2 Warp 4.5 (eBusiness Server if I recall correctly). They were mid-teir systems back in their day. The BeOS box had two Pentium 3 processors in it (~500mhz), the OS/2 box had four Pentium Pro CPUs in it.

In both cases, I was absolutely shocked at how responsive the systems felt. Especially BeOS. That thing absolutely flew. OS/2 wasn't too bad either. Of course, the complete and utter lack of superfluous animations and design ******** helped a lot. I'd kinda forgotten what it felt like to sit infront of a system that expected you to know what you were doing and do what you told it to do without question. It was just me and the machines, with nothing else to get in the way.

Modern day software kinda sucks. It's no longer about building computers that let you do everything. It's all about building computers that do everything for you, whether you want them to or not.

-SC

You bring back memories for me. I was a huge fan of OS/2 for all the right reasons including stability, emulations and clean graphics. In the business world, I also enjoyed using REXX scripting language which was pretty straight forward and allowed me to develop a maintenance system for a then known email set up that included local, multi-state via modem and other connectivity. I agree with many here who appreciated previous versions of OSX for simplicity, speed and being 'more crafted' (integrated) than what we see today which seems new features really do look like afterthought.

 

[pastrychef]

Looks like Mountain Lion/Mavericks was the sweet spot of modern Mac OS's.

I don't know abut Mountain Lion, but Mavericks had some graphics driver issues that wasn't fixed until Yosemite.
http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,8206.0.html

That being said, personally, I don't find El Capitan "heavy" and I have no issues using it. Everything feels snappy to me. Plus, as ActionableMango has mentioned, there has been under the hood optimizations in El Capitan.

By the way, I would imagine that DOS would simply fly on Mac Pros.

 

[William_si]

While Finder is broken i'm far more worried about the SMB (oh wait, AFP) and NFS implementations being utter crap again as in 10.11 - This **** is even worse than Windows, and that can't even mount NFS.

 

[T909]

macOS Sierra beta is much worse than El Capitan's beta was. So I have no hope for Sierra. Won't install. I'll stick with El Capitan as long as I can.

 

[William_si]

It's a fairly early beta though.

 

[T909]

I tried El Capitan on Beta 3 as far as I can remember.

 

[BB8]

Funny thing... Windows File Explorer is already confirmed to be getting a rework in the (soonish) future.

I wouldn't get my hopes up for Finder given how little energy Apple seems to be expending on the platform.

 

[deconstruct60]

macOS Sierra beta is much worse than El Capitan's beta was. So I have no hope for Sierra. Won't install. I'll stick with El Capitan as long as I can.

It is likely that Apple is shooting for approximately the same time of release as 10.11 (El Capitan). Either yet another likely financial gimmick to release at the end of the Quarter ( recognize the reserved money for updates as delivered ) or have new hardware queue up for mid-late Oct ( so drop it on the rest oft the deployed macs in early-mid Oct. ). The aversion shouldn't be driver so much by the current state as much as for the pre "fixed in stone" delivery date.


If it was a beta and was going to wait for the number of P1-P2 bugs to go down before shipping then this wouldn't be a problem.