Windows users with little Macintosh experience often say that
the Mac "feels slow." They find that starting up the computer,
opening applications, browsing the Internet, copying and moving
files, and other simple tasks feel slower than on their Windows
PC.
First, the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows are two completely
different operating systems. Even though operation of the user
interface is similar, they work in different ways. PCs can vary
greatly in startup time because of the instructions in the BIOS
that may need to load before Windows can start. Some take a long
time and search for each drive before Windows can load; others just
assume the drives are there and load Windows right away.
The Mac also has to search for peripherals before the operating
system can start up, but Macs tend to be a bit faster at this than
many PCs (although newer PCs do it quickly). On the other hand, the
Mac OS itself does take longer to load than most versions of
Windows.
Startup time also depends upon the speed of the computer. Mac
OS 9 on a 1 GHz G4 is going to start up in a few seconds.
The same operating system on a 233 MHz G3 will take much longer to
load.
Some applications take longer to load on the Mac. Much of this
is because Microsoft likes to "integrate" its software products
with the operating system as much as possible, so you will find
that Word for Windows loads very quickly compared to Word for
Macintosh, which takes its time.
Photoshop, which isn't a Microsoft product, has about the same
load time on a comparable Mac and PC.
Browsing the Internet - it seems I cover this very often, and
the simple fact is that Internet Explorer is integrated into
Windows, and the Mac browsers don't have that advantage to increase
their speed. (Also, Chimera, Mozilla, and Safari tend to be a lot
faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac.)
Moving and copying files is definitely fast on a PC. However, I
do have to give credit to Mac OS X 10.2, which seems to have
significantly increased the speed at which files can be transferred
from drive to drive or over a network to your local drive. At
present, I'd say that there is probably very little difference
between copying files on a PC and copying files on a Mac - and
possibly none at all.
By now, everyone (even Pixar) realizes that the PC is far ahead
in terms of Photoshop and other high end rendering performance, but
when I sit down at a computer, I'm looking at real world
performance, not which machine can benchmark higher.
For a while, a Mac with OS X was not a fast computer. In
fact, it was probably about the slowest hardware and software
combination out there. I have compared it to when System 7 came out
and much of the hardware Apple was selling at the 
time was barely able to run it, never mind run
it well. The 16 MHz 68030-based LC II and Color Classic, both of which shipped
with System 7 installed, were running at an almost unusable level
of performance. But a year and a half later, the 33 MHz 68040-based
LC 575 could run System 7.1 quite
well.
The same thing has happened with Mac OS X. When it first
came out, it was only just tolerable on Apple's most expensive
hardware. But due to improvements in the operating system itself
and increases in the speed of the hardware, Mac OS X has
become extremely useable. The G4 iMac runs X very well now, whereas
the iMac of 2000 ran it extremely slowly.
Not that everyone can afford to buy new hardware, and not that
they necessarily should, but in a few years' time the complaints
about OS X being dog slow will be nothing but a memory.
