Macbook vs. Powerbook: Preamble

Posted by pookzilla on June 10, 2006

It was just last February that I took a deep breath and chugged back a glass of Steve Jobs kool-aid and despite some initial hiccups with the hardware it’s been bliss ever since. For the most part, that is. While the Powerbook user experience was fantastic the performance of Eclipse on OS X was a mixed bag. When compared with the ThinkPad I had been doing my Eclipse development on up until that point the build speed was better but the UI responsiveness was painful. I would control-click on an item and wait seconds for a context menu to appear. It would occasionally take so long that I would think that I had failed to click the button at all. So for almost a year I alternated between love and rage when using Eclipse on OS X. This state changed somewhat just after this past Christmas, however, as I had to once again do some work on Windows. When faced with development on OS X after a session on my smoking fast Windows machine I cringed. On windows things just “popped”. Even the improved build speed that I had felt when I upgraded to the Powerbook was shattered. Suddenly my feelings toward Eclipse Mac development had soured.

When the MacBooks were announced I was excited. Surely the performance numbers being touted in relation to it’s predecessor would translate into big gains for Eclipse. But I was hesitant. No, that isn’t right at all. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy my third laptop in as many years.

All that changed last week. In a moment of weakness I ordered myself a MacBook. It’s been sitting on my lap now for several days and I’ve just now had a chance to really see how Eclipse behaves on it.

Wow.

It’s… perky. Things happen! There is no waiting! Excited by my initial impression I went and downloaded the full Callisto release and proceeded to pull down the platform-ui source and test modules from CVS. With my Powerbook I would pull down a fresh source tree and then go off to the coffee room. Building from a clean state took a good 7-10 minutes and sitting around watching it was simply too painful. A refreshing caffeinated beverage and perhaps a trip to the loo later I would return to find that it had finished its work.

On the Macbook this same operation took roughly a minute. I think I may be drinking less coffee in the future.

I’m going to set up the performance tests next week and run them on the Macbook and Powerbook to see how they compare. If I were a gambler I’d say the Powerbook is going to be spanked thoroughly.