Here is a video clip of a Dell Dimension 8250 and a 15″ Powerbook booting up side by side into Mac OS X. The Dell is, of course, running the Mactel Dev kit.

Which one boots up faster? The Dell does, of course. But why?

Here is my theory. First of all, a desktop is always going to run faster than a laptop because of the bottlenecks in data communication inside a laptop. The Dell was running 1GB of Ram with a 3Ghz P-4, while the Powerbook was probably running on 512MB of ram with 1.67Ghz. The Dell was also probably running a 7200 RPM SATA drive while the laptop was more than likely running a 5400RPM IDE drive.

Secondly, the Dell probably had a fresh install of the OS X software, while the powerbook, judging from the number of icons in the dock, probably has a good bit of software installed on it, which means more processes to start up when it is booted. Does your Windows XP still start up as fast now as it did when you first installed it 2 years ago?

And third, going back to my point about the Desktop vs. Laptop, lets see this with a G5 sitting next to a Dell laptop.

The speed factor may not have been the intent of the video, but I have seen several comments around the net saying that it was, so I thought I would throw my two cents in.