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Comment by dev1n | Hacker News Reader

If possible, could someone from the Apple community please tell me if Yosemite will be faster / lighter than snow leopard? I don't want an OS that requires 8 gigs of ram to run "fast" like Mavericks requires.

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Eh what? My wife is running Mavericks on a 3 gigs 2007 iMac and it runs at roughly the same speed as SL.

You need to come to grips with the fact that SL was the high-water mark for OS coherency/consistency/quality from Apple.

You can't pour all of this time and energy into iOS and phones and still make something as clean as SL. Which is too bad.

FWIW, I continue to run SL on an early 2009 Mac Pro with no problems or annoyances ... hope that can continue.

I left the Apple ecosystem when I couldn't move up from my 2006 Macbook Pro and stay with Snow Leopard. Mission Control was such a huge step back for window management in my opinion. I much preferred Expose'ing all my windows across all my spaces, or being able to quickly read content from a covered window while writing an email.

The improvements shown today (especially the phone integration and Swift) are making me think about returning.

I guess you can, until you run into a piece of software that wont run on SL. SL is my favorite OS X version by far too. But Lightroom 5 requires 10.7, so that's where I'm at now...

i wish i could stay on SL -- spaces was quite awesome, expose worked better, really lightweight and fast.

i stayed on SL for as long as I could (aka had to upgrade my computer).

whaaaaat? My 2012 MacBook Air with 4 gigs of RAM and SSD is lightening fast. The thing that kills performance these days on Macs is if you still have a spinning platter of rust as your storage. Don't do that. (Aside: this is not surprising - Apple has spent a lot of effort optimizing the core OS for iOS, which has always been flash-only storage)

4 gigs of RAM isn't much. On modern OSX, you'll overflow that quite frequently. Using your SSD as virtual memory isn't good for its longevity.

SSD longevity is not worth worrying about, and very nearly never was. Even with all the die shrinks reducing individual flash cell durability, consumer drives of moderate capacity still have write lifetimes exceeding a petabyte. Even a brutal workload of keeping the drive full and using it for lots of swapping won't wear it out before some other critical component of a 4GB machine fails. If you've got a very early and small SATA SSD you might be able to wear it out but the most likely mode of failure is going to be controller/firmware crashing, not NAND cell failure.

Still, if an OS cannot deal with me having a platter disk, it is SLOW (regarding file system access).

Windows is the same, slooooooow. Linux is seriously fast even with a HDD.

Of course, my next PC (whenever I'm gonna need one) will have an SSD, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't optimize "disk" access or filesystem speed in an OS.

I have Mavericks running fine on a core 2 duo ~2007 mac mini with 2GB ram. Where did you get the idea that it's slower?

I have Mavericks running on an older MBP (2007) and it runs faster than any of it's predecessors. Memory compression feature really helps a lot with that too!

Seriously, what is slow about Mavericks? Your experience sounds psychosomatic: "this is newer, it's probably slower."

quite the opposite of psychosomatic actually. When SL came out every marketing feature was it was a lighter implementation of leopard. When the succeeding OS's were released, nothing about speed was mentioned and all of the new features seemed less useful.

It came down to: "This OS has no mention of speed, so it's probably slower." which turned out to be quite true out my five friends who have upgraded to Mavericks using 2010 equipment.

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