Wholly Schmidt!

Twitter doesn’t give me enough space to respond to a friend who linked me to 17 Reasons Why Your Mac Runs Slower Than it Should at chriswrites.com so I’m going to try to take it apart here.

Some of the points Chris brings up are legit. Some of his points are questionable, but without hard data of my own, I won’t try to refute them. But plenty of his points are stupid and actively harmful to the perception of Macs:

Smart Playlists on iTunes
Smart playlists can make iTunes  slower as they have to reload  every time iTunes is launched. Disable live updating by going to File, Edit Smart Playlist and untick Live Updating.

Hey, you know what else slows down your Mac? Running programs on it. For optimal speed, don’t do anything with it. Just let that baby idle. This is not making your Mac “slower than it should be.” It’s not unusual or faulty behavior on the part of iTunes or your Mac. This is just the first of several points saying basically the same thing, so I’m going to jump out of order and quote the rest here:

Too Many Widgets on Dashboard
Each Widget on your Dashboard uses memory, again you can check the memory usage of your widgets by using the Activity Monitor. Remove any used or memory hogging widgets using the Dashboard control panel.

…

Lots of Login Items
Removing unwanted or little used programs from your login items. To change your login items go to System Preferences then Accounts and click the Login Items tab.

…

Unused Applications Left Running
All running applications use up your memory and CPU resources, quit applications if you are not going to use them for a while. Some programs have memory leakage issues which means they tend to consume more and more memory the longer they are running (again you can spot these in the Activity Monitor) it a a good idea to quit and relaunch these every so often.

And one more:

Animated Wallpapers
Animated or slide show wallpaper can really impact the performance of your machine so its a good idea to turn this off.

Indeed, it’s absolutely a good idea to turn off animated wallpapers. Unless of course, you want animated wallpapers. Here’s the problem with all of these.

Plenty of users could stand to revaluate the benefit of having a dozen different sound effect widgets running, or launching all their applications at startup, but those recommendations should be offered as general tips for any user on any operating system. Everything truly wrong with this article comes back to framing this as a Mac running slower than it should. That is absolutely deceitful. It’s a simple reality that any computer has limited resources, and as you spread them thinner with more demands, performance will suffer. But explaining this as a Mac running slower than it should makes every one of these quoted tips sound like an admission of a problem with the Mac. Each of the quoted tips brings up a legitimate use of your computer and then implies that you shouldn’t really be doing that if you want your Mac work right.

If I told you “Oh don’t run a bunch of widgets, Macs go slow when you use a bunch of widgets,” you could technically extrapolate a kind of truth with some generous assumptions about what I mean by “slow” and “bunch”, but no one’s going to hear that. They’re going to hear “Mac widgets are slow.” That’s the mistake this article makes over and over again, and it’s the difference between being pedantic about grammar and having a serious issue with the implications of the entire article.

I saved the best two for last:

Firefox Overloaded With Extensions
There are loads of awesome Firefox extensions so its easy to get carried away and add to many. Take a few moments to go through your Add-ons (open Firefox and go to tools then Add-ons) and uninstall any you no longer use.

So now, in addition to everything I said above applying to this little nugget of advice, Chris is confusing a third party application (that’s available on other platforms where the exact same advice would apply) with your Mac. Gob Bluth said it best: “Come on!”

But wait, seriously. Best and Last:

Not Enough RAM
Software can only take you so far. Upgrading your RAM will probably give you the biggest speed increase out of any of these tips. You can use the Activity Monitor application (under Utilities in the Application folder) to check if your Mac would benefit from more RAM. Click on System Memory tab and have a look at the pie chart at the bottom. If the chart is largely red or orange you are running out of RAM. Also take a look at the Page Ins and Outs numbers, if these are continually increasing, its time to upgrade your RAM.

Yes. That’s right. Chris just informed us that our Mac does not run as fast as another, physically more powerful Mac. I’m out of clever ways to mix astonishment and rage.