Is it just me, or is a 20″ iMac 2GHz Intel Core Duo with 2GB RAM not as fast as you’d expect it to be?

I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s generally faster than my 800MHz Pentium III running Linux was. But I’m still spending a lot of time hanging around waiting for it to do stuff. For example:

Safari sometimes sits there for 30-60 seconds with a spinning beach-ball when I try to switch tabs (often after the Mac’s recently woken from sleep, but sometimes for no apparent reason at all).

Spotlight is shockingly slow sometimes – it can sit there for over a minute. Quicker to just find the file manually!

Waking from sleep is a good exercise in patience. The display appears more or less straight away, but it’s a good 20 seconds before you can actually log in, and then another 20 seconds before you can click something in the Dock.

I know NeoOffice isn’t renowned as a speed demon, but the thing’s actually slower than OpenOffice was on my Linux box (if that’s possible)! The thing takes about a minute to start, and sometimes I’m waiting for at least a minute between clicking the close button and a document actually closing. WTF?

OfficeTime and IE5 (I know, I know – I’m a web developer…) are slow as molasses, but then they are running under Rosetta, so I’ll let them off. (C’mon OfficeTime, let’s have this Universal version you’ve been promising for the last 6 months!)

Where’s all this super-duper 2GHz processor power going?! I know I’m a bit of a “power user” and tend to have 10-15 apps open at once, and often run Parallels with a 256MB virtual XP machine, but I mean, 2GHz and 2GB RAM shouldn’t be this slow, should it?

Having spent 3 or so weeks with the new iTunes 7, here are a few thoughts related to my previous post:

iPod Gapless Playback: Yes it works in iTunes too! 🙂 Very happy about that. It’s a bit weird how you have to tag each tune with the “Part of a gapless album” option though – why can’t it just not put gaps in by default?

Scratch all that stuff about iTunes now supporting movies and TV shows – it’s not available in Australia. So I’m still stuck with DVD region hell. 🙁 *sulk* And they wonder why BitTorrent is so popular…

It’s actually really nice to have CoverFlow integrated in iTunes – makes it much smoother. However it doesn’t work on shared playlists for some reason. Speaking of which – Front Row seems to behave better with shared iTunes stuff now; you can watch shared video podcasts for example, which I don’t think was possible before. It’s getting there!

It will be interesting to see how well iTV does when it’s finally out…