“Both Microsoft and Apple claim their new operating systems are sleeker and faster than ever before. But OS upgrades are often fraught with trouble,” David Gewirtz reports for ZDNet. “We decided to pit these two champion OSs against each other to see which would perform an in-place upgrade faster.”
“The big challenge with this sort of test is making sure the testing platforms are close enough. There’s always a bit of a spec war when pitting a Mac against a PC. This is because while both use common components, there’s inevitably something different,” Gewirtz reports. “Not this time. This time we took a 2012 Mac mini with two SSD drives, and we upgraded an in-place version of OS X on one drive, and an in-place Boot Camp version of Windows on the other drive. This means that our network configurations, data channels, and disk performance were absolutely identical.”
“The starting point from an OS perspective was not identical, however. We started on the Windows side with Windows 8.1, which had received all available Windows updates just a few days earlier. It was about as current for 8.1 as it gets,” Gewirtz reports. “On the OS X side, we started with OS X 10.8.4, better known as Mountain Lion… That puts it three releases behind the current El Capitan release of OS X.”
“By a 4.1-to-1 margin, the OS X upgrade was faster,” Gewirtz reports. “It was also smoother, requiring no power cycles or forced reboots, and it had no crashes.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Windows was slow, rocky, and crashed while Mac was fast, smooth, and just worked. Shocker.