Oh I agree, I cringed hard back then as well but at least the Mac software and speed was decent so I figured the beginning of their slow downfall will not affect me for a while, and I was right.
Nowadays though... I am stuck with a former workstation-grade hardware where Neovim needs FIVE SECONDS TO START because macOS is auditing each and every of its syscalls. I switch to my (now allegedly ancient) full-AMD laptop with 5500U CPU and the only thing that needs more than 0.5 secs to start is Firefox. I was not able to find one thing that did not react instantly. I am seriously considering just plugging my 35" gaming display to the Linux laptop and make that my main work setup.
And you are right -- pro users made Apple rich but are now undesired because they apparently demand too much ("Who needs stable software, bleeeerrrrgh! Am I right guys?"). Yeah, screw Apple. I am back on the hamster-wheel employment grind now, sadly, but once I stabilize a bit more I'll just move to 2 HiDPI display and assemble a future-proof Linux workstation to go wit them. Pretty sure that with periodical thermal paste maintenance it can easily last me 10 years and I'd only change it if there's something seriously tempting out there (about which I am very doubtful; the tech giants were only worried about becoming oligopolists and they care not about their users' needs).
Apple had its opportunities. They wasted them. Sure, many people will consider them the top for a while still and will keep buying, but their pricing policy has made it blindingly obvious that less people are buying and they are now doing their damnedest to compensate for this by either including less in the package, making the carton package itself cheaper, or just making all products except the base models outrageously overpriced. That's how they keep the profit margins. The curse of being a public-traded company and all that.
Those policies will work for them. For some time more. I wonder what happens after.
Something's seriously wrong with your system. I just launched nvim on mine and couldn't measurably detect the interval between hitting enter to exec the command and seeing the welcome screen. Even opening and immediately quitting my substantially customized Emacs took 1.7s.
Your setup should not be taking many seconds to do those routine things. Last time I experienced something like that, I had a dying harddrive that was logging a continual series of read timeouts.
I don’t have that one anymore to test it. I’d suggest using Disk Utility to check the entire drive for errors and ruling that out first.
I don’t want to sound like “it works on my machine”, but what you’re describing is so far out of expectations that I’ve gotta wonder if it’s an error condition.
I really don't think it'd be those mitigations. Estimates I've seen floating around estimate it to be a total 15-25% performance hit when heavily loaded.
For additional context, last weekend I went around to every old Intel Mac in a medical office to upgrade their OSes and some of the apps on them. None of them were speed demons, but they were all just proportionally slower than my much newer Mx Macs. Regular "small" apps still loaded quickly and were perfectly usable. This is in a busy office where any slowdowns that kept people from working at full speed would be fixed.
And just because it works for me doesn't automatically mean it's got to work for you, of course. I'm not going to doubt your experience. It's more that what you're describing is so very different than what I'm seeing that it feels like there's got to be something more at play here.
Nowadays though... I am stuck with a former workstation-grade hardware where Neovim needs FIVE SECONDS TO START because macOS is auditing each and every of its syscalls. I switch to my (now allegedly ancient) full-AMD laptop with 5500U CPU and the only thing that needs more than 0.5 secs to start is Firefox. I was not able to find one thing that did not react instantly. I am seriously considering just plugging my 35" gaming display to the Linux laptop and make that my main work setup.
And you are right -- pro users made Apple rich but are now undesired because they apparently demand too much ("Who needs stable software, bleeeerrrrgh! Am I right guys?"). Yeah, screw Apple. I am back on the hamster-wheel employment grind now, sadly, but once I stabilize a bit more I'll just move to 2 HiDPI display and assemble a future-proof Linux workstation to go wit them. Pretty sure that with periodical thermal paste maintenance it can easily last me 10 years and I'd only change it if there's something seriously tempting out there (about which I am very doubtful; the tech giants were only worried about becoming oligopolists and they care not about their users' needs).
Apple had its opportunities. They wasted them. Sure, many people will consider them the top for a while still and will keep buying, but their pricing policy has made it blindingly obvious that less people are buying and they are now doing their damnedest to compensate for this by either including less in the package, making the carton package itself cheaper, or just making all products except the base models outrageously overpriced. That's how they keep the profit margins. The curse of being a public-traded company and all that.
Those policies will work for them. For some time more. I wonder what happens after.