I remember seeing a few posts here and there where people complained about performance degrading each time they upgraded OS X. My last 3 laptops had been Mac's (a White Macbook, then a Macbook Pro from 2010, then a Retina Macbook Pro from these days...) and while I feel 'satisfied' I also kind of noticed that performance is always worse, and somehow the more I upgrade, the more I feel like a pain the ass when I use that computer. Since there are no serious benchmarks on to this (I wonder why) I always thought that it was more of a 'feeling' than something real, or that maybe, sure there was a bit more lag but I'm running more 'advanced' software.
So yeah, that was me dreaming about how $4,000+ dollars on laptops had not gone down the drain when I paid a visit to an old friend. I asked my friend to borrow his computer because I needed to check an email and he did. Old friend's Macbook is one of these [1], that is, a laptop that wasn't even top of the line TEN YEARS AGO. I've opened and became surprised that battery still worked. "Dude, have you ever replaced the battery on this?" "Nope" "Weird, maybe he just doesn't use it too much"... Laptop woke up almost immediately, it had OS X Tiger running... Tiger... not even leopard.
And then I started using it... HOLY F* (excuse the expletives) I WISH MY F* RETINA MACBOOK WORKED LIKE THAT. Everything was smooth, Firefox opened like immediately (no SSD obv. but ok maybe it was already on RAM), I was able to finish my work and read a few articles and I felt really comfortable the whole time, and I want to clarify on this, I didn't felt that I was using a computer to do my work, that was kind of the magic that Apple products used to have (all of them, even iPods...). Now I'm always like, oh I gotta do this, click ... wait ... open this ... wait ... send this ... wait ... change this setting ... wait. Now I can state it for sure, Apple is really screwing it up on its software.
I haven't dropped Apple because fortunately for them, most other laptops feel even worst (at least they haven't screwed the trackpad yet...) but as soon as a well-made Linux notebook appears I'm out.
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/MacBook_P...