The "magic" Apple is doing is not being bogged down by 30 year old APIs and (as of the latest version of macOS, High Sierra) not being bogged down by a 30 year old file system. Apple computers were slower when they ran HFS+, since it was the textbook definition of a bodge (British term meaning to patch something to sort-of-make-it-work).
Windows would be a vastly better OS if Microsoft actually followed through and implemented a new file system to replace NTFS. Does anyone even remember Windows NT, the namesake of NTFS?
Are we measuring in nano seconds or what is this based on? Like the actual slowdown for I/O comes from the disk used in first place. Would be surprised if you had actual numbers for the same disk with macOs and Windows in the latest versions. Doubt that the filesystem has a high or even noticeable impact, but who knows.
Plus, let's not forget, as a dev, not a gamer, not a designer or anything else, only ways to notice I/O impact are boot times (OS, sw, whatever) and build times, which generally correlate with the rest of your hardware very tightly aswell (swap, cycles, etc.). At least that's all I see
Then again you're using ancient hardware and taking that as your prime example. Why would you run a 2018 OS on a 2012 system and then complain about that others are better with adopting legacy systems?
Like hell, even I as a webdev hate supporting legacy browsers and as such simply don't do it if I don't have to. Something you should be able to relate to aswell. This is a natural project management step, hence, it has nothing to do with sw or hw, it's just the company policy and decision not to support or put less effort in supporting legacy systems.
Yet my 2011 XPS still runs without any slowdowns - admittedly I'm still running Win 7 on that. No clue how that would perform with Win 10, though. But he, I'm not going to install a 2018 OS on a 2011 machine and expect it to run as smoothly as anything else. The reason for that is simple: A lot of Windows 8+ improvements are for example tied to UEFI, 64-bit support and all that stuff. Read: Hw upgrade needed to profit from these improvements.
If your OS does that without an upgrade, nice, good for you. Anyone else would seriously look forward to upgrading the system before even thinking about if it may or may not work. I didn't even know that you could install the latest macOS on 2012 modells, but I definitely wouldn't install Win 10 on my first computer from the 90's.
I mean, there is a reason why there are hardware requirements and recommendations.
tl;dr: Legacy hw underperforming with latest sw is not a good point to pick on.
This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, there's not "a lot more to do" on Windows, unless you count gaming. Even if you do, there's literally no valid reason as to why having a lot of games (or other applications) installed should slow down your entire computer.*
Unless of course you're conceding that Windows is a garbage OS bogged down with legacy code and legacy designs that can't handle creating lots of folders & files in a special location without slowing down everything else on the system, until you do a reformat and reinstall
Why should I "care a little bit about my environment"? Why do I need to pay for and/or use 3rd party applications to "clean up" my environment? Is there a single valid reason for why I should have to bother with that (discounting the situation in which you might be running out of disk space on your OS drive), vs just spending my time using the computer that is as fast as the day I installed it, months or years later?
*
I am of course not counting applications that run as services, e.g. if I install the Apache / MySQL / PHP stack I expect any computer to slow down somewhat. I am talking about regular applications that do not do anything when they're not running, such as games, an FTP program, etc.
But I am talking about exactly that stuff. I was kinda surprised when I noticed how many programs silently install an autostart service. More so, I didn't understand why they would even need it. For example, why would my on-demand video converter need to boot with Windows? There's a reason why it's on-demand. Stuff like this means free slowdowns on every boot and everything involved with that. And yea, a lot of people don't know about this. It's not advertised nor documented, so why would anyone even care about it?
I don't know how that's handled in macOS, but hard to imagine it would be any different.
Plus, that's an undeniable fact, there is way more sw out there for Windows, so way more stuff you can do and install.
Ultimately, you're correct, the tasks are the same, but that's not what people care about (nor was it my point). 10 PDF readers installed? Seems legit. Using registry optimizers & cleaners? Congratulations, you're doing everything wrong. Heard about that new chinese software which has Snapchat filters for Windows? Yes, let's install that. Oh hey, downloaded something from a trusted page, but it has its own installer instead of the vendor installer? Congrats, you got some extra adware for free aswell.
Stuff like this is the reason why people say that Windows slows down with time. It's their own fault. That's what I meant. Probably the same for macOS aswell, if there was that kind of variety.
You don't need to pay a single penny for that, lol. You just need brain.exe and afaik that's free to every human being
Just as an example - my boot time has always been between 9.x - 11.x s. My old PC is running since 2014. I never had to reinstall Windows, even upgraded from 7->8->8.1 (probably not going to 10 anytime soon
) without a clean install. It hasn't slowed down a single bit, other than what's expected due to my customization. Additionally, this is my all-round system which includes gaming and video editing. I don't see any lags regarding I/O. For the simple reason that the 2014 hw works really well with a 2014 OS. And I would bet it would perform as well, if not better, with a 2018 OS.
