To ensure our results were representative, we tested the OSes on the same hardware – a pair of mid-range Mac systems with relatively limited power, where performance could easily be a real-world issue. Our mission was to find out whether Apple’s native OS gives a performance advantage over Windows, or whether it’s actually slower. With that in mind, we set out with a stopwatch to time how long OS X and Windows took to complete a variety of common desktop tasks. As such, they perform the same jobs quite differently. What’s more, while many mainstream applications are offered on both platforms, they’re implemented in different ways, as dictated by the different platform architectures.
OS X and Windows are based on different kernels, with different approaches to multitasking and virtual memory. One factor that’s difficult to quantify is performance.
