I saw the beach ball…
October 29, 2007 – 8:46 amFirst of all… Leopard is much quicker, so the beach ball is a very rare thing.
Tiger (which probably contained all sorts of optimizations to make the beach ball need to appear less often) seemed to change the code that said “display the beach ball” so that sometimes everything would be unresponsive, and then 5 (or so) seconds later the beach ball would show up. Apple probably hoped that people would think things were faster than they were because of this delay.
Leopard seems to have thrown in the ticking watch cursor for a similar effect but also contains noticeable upgrades in the speed department…
