I'm a recent Mac "switcher", having purchased one of the speed-bumped 900MHz iBooks only a few weeks ago. At first, the various "eye-candy" tricks employed by OS X were cute (the genie effect, bouncing Dock icons, magnification, etc.), but like most OS X users, I quickly tired of them and turned them all off in the Dock Preferences. Now, I would've expected that changing from the Genie effect to the less-processor-intensive Scale effect would make windows appear to minimiza a bit faster, but I was quite surprised that turning off magnification and icon animation actually makes it feel as if programs *launch* more quickly! On a G3-powered iBook, this is an especially good thing. I haven't timed it (it's surely no more than a few tenths of a second faster), but was just curious if anybody else noticed this. Maybe it's just my imagination (or wishful thinking)? Anyway, I'm much happier with all that silly stuff switched off, and OS X feels much more "business-like".
I'd say its not your imagination. Prior to upgrading to Jaguar and prior to my overclock job my 500MHz iBook crawled along in OS X. I think I went through and used just about every trick from turning off font smoothing to disabling window drop shadows and switching to the hidden and even faster "suck" effect and noticed my machine became much more responsive feeling. It may not actually be faster but if it gives you the impression its faster that's good enough right? If you're into those kind of tweaks there are tons of programs out there (to be used at your own risk of course) to enable or disable features in OS X that you couldn't otherwise do through system preferences or through the GUI. unsanity.com comes to mind but there are lots of tricks and programs out there... I totally agree that Macs are "pretty" but there comes a point when you need functionality. Enjoy!
