Does Mac OS X get slower over time like Windows?

I've had my Win7 PC for about a year, and it is already sooo slow. Please tell me a Mac doesn't do this.

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    Any computer, regardless of what operating system you are running will suffer from this. This slowdown that you see is clutter and build up of programs and extra installed items that eat up system resources.

    If you treat your Mac(or Windows, Linux, etc) computer properly and maintain it you will continue to see it performing well. Preventative and routine maintenance is required, just like with a car, go through your computer once a month and remove unneeded software and make sure that software you DO want isn't starting up and running all the time(if you only need it some of the time).

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  • No it does not. For years i was a windows person. Could not understand why people paid so much for MacBooks. Till i bought one.

    My 3yr old MacBook Pro runs AS FAST, BOOTS AS QUICK as the day i took it out of the box.

    My wife has bought 2 dell laptops in the same time. Both reached the point which you would need to turn them on, take a shower, get dressed and then sit down to work.

    The only reason i am buying a new MacBook Pro is because she wants my old MacBook Pro.

    Simply put you will not notice a slow down in boot time, performance or shut down speeds over time.

    You get what you pay for. And i have NEVER walked into an Apple store to get help and been turned away. No, Apple is not cheap. No Question. But when you factor in buying 3 windows machines over the life of my one MacBook Pro, I actually came out ahead.

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  • newer applications tend to require beefier processor and RAM powers. but if you factor out application requirements, Macs does not suffer speed slowdowns encountered on a windows PC.

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  • All I can say is this. I do preventative maintenance on all my computers on a regular basis and my PowerBook G4 circa 2004 boots faster than the Asus netbook I bought in 2009. The G4 has a 1.33 ghz processor and 512k in ram. The Asus has a 1.66 ghz processor and 2 gigs of ram. Need I say more?

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  • I have heard this so many times from Windows users. I do know that two very old Macs, a 7250/120 and a 6400, in my music studio can no longer burn CDs at 24X speed, as of about 2 years ago. I have used these machines with external Firewire burners for this purpose for a long time. In fact, they were both built in the mid 90s, so they are really old. Other than that, I have not noticed any slow down in a Mac.

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  • All three of my "old" Apples still work FINE! My Powerbook (1991) still boots for games for family kids. It was the lightest and most powerful machine for traveling then, and still my 1992 HP portable color printer. I still use my Quadra, bought in 1994. It's an external drive now, to be sure, but it works like new, including old versions of Adobe and Microsoft apps. It NEVER ONCE crashed. My beautiful iMac (green) also still works likewise. I had more issues with it, and can't recall if they were app-oriented or OS-oriented. Haven't figured out what it could be useful for except art.

    My "new" MacBook Pro, purchased in 2006, is my current one, updated to OSX 10.6.8. I have had more issues with this than any other Mac, but the issues are related to Microsoft products mostly (really buggy, reluctantly joined OS X late, etc.), and the fact that I'm asking it to do a helluva lot more than I ever asked any other machine to do. And I filled up the HD with photos and huge Word/Adobe files and didn't keep it clean. I installed MacKeeper and released 23GB to freedom, and did a lengthy disk repair that has speeded things back up. I still have a lot of junk and MK will help with that. The only hangs/crashes I ever have are related to lovely Microsoft products going stupid on me. If my clients weren't serfs to them, I'd go fully open-source. Starting to do that with my iPad. Macs are easy to learn to maintain.

    Meantime, my husband's poor old Dells and HPs have been gathering dust, one after another (FOUR laptops and FOUR PCs over ten years), as they slowed dowwwwn, and their OS systems got murkier and more difficult and more costly to keep updated and fixed. And HE is an IT manager! He uses my computer(s) for everything except simple emailing, writing, and spreadsheets. All other programs (tax, DB, bookkeeping, presentations), he books time for on mine. My son, a CS major, wiped a couple of his desktops clean and installed Linux (with Debian). Go figure. Literally! :-)

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  • No it would not .... it will run for years with the same performance. I ve always been a windows user until i got blown away buy the speed and performance of an iMac, since then i got a macbook. you can notice with the years going by the windows pcs the system tend to get slower in booting up and shutting down, and the most notable is the bad performance and the issues you ll get if you put the windows to sleep and especially for a long period of time like a day or so, sometimes it won't boot up again and you'll encounter a lot of times where you have to force shutdown or remove the battery and restart your PC again.

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  • A Mac does not slow in my experience and I have had several Macs from an SE30 (1990!) onwards. My present Mac is a 17" MacBook Pro. Had it for over two years. No slowing AT ALL! Note the AT ALL. New (and sizeable) Applications installed. No. More files, databases etc. on disc. No. Several Apps open, all working on something at the same time. No. Nothing effects it.

    This is why Apple advertises 'It just works'! :)

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