Reply to post:

Mourning Apple's war against sockets? The 2018 Mac mini should be your first port of call

Lee D Silver badge

Mac OS legitimately? No.

But my 8-year-old laptop has a VMWare virtual machine on it with MacOS from my "proving" the same thing to somebody else.

With that OS, running inside a Windows 7 hypervisor, I can allocate 25% of the laptop resources and enjoy BETTER performance inside the VM than on a real Mac. While also getting real-work done and even virtualising other OS (I have Windows, Mac and Linux VMs running on a Windows machine, all picking up the same codebase and all compiling via Eclipse and running the result to test it works, in case you wonder why.)

Granted, it was a couple of years ago that I last did this specifically to prove the point, but my laptop is EIGHT YEARS OLD. And it can virtualise MacOS in one-quarter of its resources, faster than Mac native hardware. Seriously... go try it. VMWare Workstation and a couple of UEFI config file tweaks to make it boot.

Honestly, that same 8-year-old laptop still beats out this Mac Mini! It's Intel i7, 12Gb RAM, dual-drive bays with 1TB in each (but I later replaced one with a 1Tb SSD - however the tests above were NOT done when it had an SSD) and has nVidia graphics (I think it's a 960M, to show you that it's hardly top-of-the-range even back then!).

If you don't realise that MacOS is clever-tricks and showmanship and NOT actual performance, then you've not looked into it. The slippy-slidey menu at the bottom is a perfect example. You're led to think it's scaling those icon in real time. It's not. They are pre-cached bitmaps in a variety of sizes. It's giving you a GIF animation, basically. On the VM I made, you can knock the allocation down to a single-core and it still does slippy-slidey quite smoothly, but every performance metric of "real work" (e.g. loading apps, browsing websites, compiling code, etc.) falls below on the actual Mac hardware compared to a VM experience.

MacOS is designer shine on a hardware turd. Sure, it's "clever" in its way, but it's entirely snakeoil.

Honestly - if you have VMWare (I don't think it works in anything else as it has a serious UEFI integration), go Google how to do it, load MacOS up and run it. If you dial-down the resources allocated, you'll instantly spot what's snakeoil and what's actual performance. And your PC will still kick the Mac's arse.

Honestly, the only reason to own MacOS is if you need to cross-compile to Mac, where you can only reasonably do so via an up-to-date XCode, which usually needs and up-to-date MacOS, no matter what compiler / development environment you are using. I use Eclipse and the CDT, and the only sensible way to cross-compile to Mac is to load Eclipse on MacOS, configure it to load the XCode etc. compilers and libaries, and then make that do the compile.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon