However it is easier on Windows to mess up the experience - install some crappy antivirus or other messy program and it is a piece of cake to make Windows feel laggy.
It's not just that they have good framerate - even Android can get good average framerate. The amazing thing about iOS that it gets amazing maximum frame delay, i.e. the space between frames is almost never more than 33ms (~30fps). On Android you frequently run into tiny little hiccups in frame delay that might not impact its measured FPS, but are certainly noticeable to the human eye. The result is that it just doesn't feel as smooth.
I don't know how Apple achieved this. It's certainly not perfect - you can occasionally get an iDevice to freeze for a few hundred milliseconds, but those are very rare occurrences. It's as if they have a real-time guarantee built into the system, but I don't think they actually have one. Which is a pretty amazing accomplishment.
edit: Example of better measurements: http://techreport.com/articles.x/22151/6 Notice how Radeons have lower avg fps but the framerate seems more stable.
OS X was written from the ground up to be graphics-intensive. From very early on, Quartz, OS X's compositing manager, has been using the GPU to render windows to OpenGL textures, essentially using the graphics card's very fast 3D support to render a 2D screen.
Windows's classic GDI (which has been replaced by Aero, afaik, but I guess most apps are still GDI) is considerably simpler, and leaves the drawing entirely to the application. This is the reason you see a lot more redraw flickering in Windows apps. Some apps are so slow at redrawing that when you resize the window to make it bigger, you can see the new unpainted areas filled with various garbage (or with some default background colour at best) before the actual content comes in. To create smooth, non-flickering widget drawing in Windows you have always been forced to do the double-buffering yourself.
Even in Windows 7 there is a lot of redraw flickering. I'm particularly annoyed about how the mouse cursor tend to flicker randomly -- eg. when Internet Explorer is loading a page -- which is such a small, trivial detail, but one that ends up making the entire OS feel shoddily built.
But OSX UI certainly never has been reacting faster than Windows UI. Things like opening dirs, menu navigation, window resizing, etc is much faster in Window and its been that way since OSX started (OS9 and prior had a fast UI).
> I’m not an OS-engineer but my guess is that [...]
Indeed.
Indeed, I have to confess that I quickly skim linked articles from here, and if they seem to be largely narrative/opinion, I hit back. There just isn't enough time in the day to read yet another subjective opinion: Give me the facts.
1. The trackpad hardware is great. It's so good that when we were making the Bamboo Touch at Wacom, the Macbook Pro trackpad was the standard we measured ourselves against.
2. True pixel-level scrolling from HID devices. Windows has the concept of "wheel scrolling", but it's only vertical, and lots of apps won't scroll in less than a wheel increment (which is oddly 120 units), so you're stuck with jerky 3-lines-at-a-time scrolling. Oh, and it's vertical-only; there's no system standard for horizontal scrolling.
3. It's never had a software-based rendering and compositing engine for the windowing system. The Windows team is fully committed to backward-compatibility, which means allowing all sorts of wonky GDI-based pixel pushers to work they same way they did in Win95. OSX has been OpenGL-based from the start.
2. Wheel scrolling is a feature. Yes, horizontal scrolling sucks but vertical scrolling is working as intended and something I really prefer. Yes, I'd like a good horizontal scroll but the use cases where you need it are extremely rare and often stem from bad UI design in the application - not saying that as an excuse but just that it isn't a big issue. Microsoft have tried scrolling wheels that can go horizontal as well but they were mindbogglingly bad (my opinion).
3. I don't see how that is an issue (in practice) for anything that isn't done for Win95. And if it was made for Win95 I'd rather be able to run it than not. Backwards compatibility at its best. Doesn't bother you when you don't need it but can still handle corner cases as well as can be expected.
I used Mac for a week and went back to Windows. The jerky scrolling in Windows was driving me crazy. The fact was that before Mac I never realized that (maybe I'm numb to perfection) but it was only using Mac that it occurred how much crap scrolling is in Windows.
The change in responsiveness in the UI when you're no longer using the trackpad is astonishing. It takes me longer to perform tasks on my Mac than it does on my Windows 7 platform - particularly if that task involves switching between windows in the same application. The loss of my extra mouse buttons to move backwards & forwards on web pages has been especially painful (though oddly, they work to bring up Mission Control & the Application window controls)
And frankly, after using Mintty from Cygwin, the default terminal on the Mac was pretty terrible to use. Fortunately, that was easily remedied with the use of iTerm.
I'm looking forward to the time I no longer have to use a Mac for work development.
I've tried using Expose and multi desktop setups but they just add complexity to my flow. Expose looks pretty but I avoid it because it randomly lays out the thumbs in some way that has nothing to do with how I've actually arranged them. Command + tab is application based, so I can't switch between windows easily. Command + tilde does that but it works completely differently by switching windows on keydown and keypress instead of showing an overlay. I'm sure next version of the OS X will introduce a new window management tools and obscure short cuts that just adds complexity to the system. The whole thing feels like random band aid solutions built up over the last 10 years.
In my opinion, "a better Terminal" is not a strong premise when it comes to making a general case for one OS's user interface being superior to another's.
[edit] If the comparison was between bash (et al.) and Powershell, then terminal preference would seemingly be based on familiarity rather than the degree to which one can access the OS via the command line.
There are other things, which makes me like OS X more, but being faster or more stable is not one of them.
I find crashes far more disruptive on OS X - argh...the dreaded spinning beach ball. Windows app crashes (when they happen) rarely cause me any harm beyond restarting that single app and telling Windows I don't want to send a bug report to MS.
I'm always blown away when picking up the iPad just how seamlessly I can fly between different apps, tabs, airplay, etc.
I use both Windows and OS X all through the day and while the response on both is adequate, the Core 2 Quad Windows 7 box is much more responsive than my MBP with the high end 15" i7. They both have 8GB RAM -- but then again, my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad X200 feels more responsive, and requires fewer resources.
I've never experienced or heard of the "infamous" cloned dialogs bug on Windows 7, but oddly, I have experienced it on OS X. Conversely, I've never experienced the reported cursor lag on OS X.
Like I said, I find both OSes perfectly good, but the post just seems suspect to me.
Now, if only Microsoft would integrate a well-supported, well-integrated, native bash/zsh. I can't bring myself to like Powershell.
That's one thing I really miss since I went to using an Ubuntu HP Touchpad instead of a laptop, there's no flashing hard drive indicator to let me know if it's still working or if it's just hung.
Because that feels unnatural, it creates fatigue and builds separation between the user and his work.
UI guru Jakob Nielsen has an excellent description of this here:
