Is Snow Leopard the new Vista?

Most users, regardless of their technical expertise, will tell you that Vista is slower than Windows XP. They'd be right, too -- in many respects, Vista trails behind its predecessor when it comes to raw speed. CNET News site reported that Vista -- even with Service Pack 1 (SP1) -- performed significantly slower than XP Service Pack 3 (SP3).

Paul Mockapetris, the man widely credited with inventing the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), once claimed Vista itself would slow down the entire Internet because it supported two versions of the Internet Protocol -- IPv4 and IPv6 -- which would essentially double Internet traffic.

These factors were potentially troublesome enough, but Vista's introduction of User Account Controls (UAC) really put the apathetic cat among the lethargic pigeons. Many seemingly innocuous actions needed to be user-verified through the use of a pop-up box demanding to know whether we were sure we meant to do the thing we'd just asked it to do.

Surely not Snow Leopard?

All the new features in Snow Leopard point to a far quicker operating system. It takes advantage of 64-bit multicore processors, has better access to RAM, gets high-powered graphics-processing units, and all the major applications in Snow Leopard -- including the Finder -- have been rewritten in 64-bit code.

Despite all this, our experience of Snow Leopard is that it's not noticeably quicker than OS X 10.5. In fact, in CNET.com's benchmark tests of the two operating systems on two sets of identical Apple laptops, Snow Leopard was actually slower than its predecessor.

Our tests of iTunes encoding was distinctly quicker with the old OS, but the most staggering difference could be seen in our QuickTime multi-tasking test. On an older MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard 10.6, the test completed in 1,127.25 seconds. The same laptop with the older Leopard 10.5.8 took just 732.15 seconds.

Snow Leopard isn't a complete dog -- far from it -- but given that it's slower than Leopard in most of our tests, its parallels with Vista over XP are evident.