I just read some more benchmarks showing poor performance of Mac OS X, whether on Intel or PowerPC. But it doesn't matter, because it works so well, right? :-)
In the benchmarks above, Windows XP scored much better than Mac OS X in performance, but as one of my colleagues remarked to me today, "I unwind by reinstalling Windows."
My Athlon XP 2400+ PC is nearing 3 years old, and has not been reinstalled since i switched from ATA to SATA drives nearly 2 years ago, and runs perfectly well in 512 MB RAM, despite running database servers, network management, and a host of desktop applications. (Not to mention 12 workspaces which let me keep my work permanently open and still well organised.)
More grist for the mill!
Researcher: Apple Patch falls short.
On the other hand, Andy Tanenbaum is right about reliability being more important than performance. Some of the reliability features of Minix 3 sound interesting. (But his racoon mascot is nowhere near as cool as Tux.)