Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard Speed Tests: Who Cares?

A couple of weeks ago, many Mac enthusiast sites ran pieces with headlines declaring that Snow Leopard was faster than Windows 7. The source for this news was CNET’s Dong Ngo, who ran a battery of tests designed to test gaming performance, media encoding time, battery life, and other attributes.

Ngo was fairly even-handed in his reporting. While noting that Snow Leopard beat out Windows 7 in many of the benchmarks, he also said that many of the poorer results (battery life in particular) were probably caused in part by unoptimized drivers on his test machine (a Mac). This makes sense, since Apple has said that official Windows 7 support for Boot Camp isn’t coming until later this year.

Of course, just because Ngo’s piece was fair doesn’t mean that everyone else was – most sites seemed perfectly willing to boil his report down to “Snow Leopard faster than Windows 7, buy a Mac.”

Now we’ve got people like PC Pro’s Chris Brennan claiming the opposite, that Windows 7 is in fact snappier than Snow Leopard, albeit without the benefit of benchmarks, charts and graphs. The Internet has only had a couple of days with this one, but rest assured that there will be headlines like “Windows 7 faster than Snow Leopard” floating around soon enough.

The problem with the people who write these follow-up pieces is that (1) they’re oversimplifying both Ngo’s and Brennan’s reporting and (2) they’re perpetuating an endless and pointless cycle, where Mac enthusiasts and Windows enthusiasts take endless stupid potshots at one another that don’t mean anything or add anything meaningful to the discussion.

I have trouble understanding why people invest themselves so personally in the Mac and Windows platforms. I suppose that choosing a computer is sometimes a way that people express themselves, like wearing a particular T-shirt or driving a particular car. Even so, trading insults on the Internet about whether to choose PC or Mac seems to me like a waste of time to me.

OS X and Windows are both good at different things, and so I’ll often switch back and forth between platforms depending on what I’m trying to accomplish. For example, no matter how fast Macs get, I don’t think they’ll ever make one that can open Word 2008 faster than any given 3-year-old PC can open Word 2007. Office is just faster on Windows.

Likewise, my experiences with editing video on Windows have all been horrible, soul-crushing, time-consuming, nightmarish ordeals that have left me a shell of the man I once was. If I’m going to stitch together some nice looking movies, I’ll go to the Mac every time.

If I’m interested in playing games that aren’t browser-based Flash games or 3D Chess, I’ll go to the PC. The back-and-forth could go on forever if I wanted it to.

My point is, so what if one OS is faster than the other OS at some tasks, or better than the other OS at some tasks? People need to remember that computers are tools, and not all tools are suited for all tasks. If my wrench won’t hammer in a nail, it’s not the wrench’s fault – I just need to go get a hammer and get on with my life.