Happy August! Gosh, we do love the changing of the months; we get to start writing 8s instead of 7s on our checks, there's a new wiener dog picture on the kitchen calendar, and-- best of all-- we can officially start talking about how Mac OS X 10.1 is due "next month." (Actually, we're not entirely sure that is better than the calendar thing-- on the one hand, sure, it's nice that we'll have better performance and a raft of new functionality in 30-60 days, but on the other hand, this is one seriously cute wiener dog we're talking about, here.)

In any case, whether or not you find it as exciting as a charming snapshot of a dachshund, version 10.1 of Apple's shiny new operating system is due to arrive sometime next month, and after Uncle Steve's little demo a couple of weeks ago, lots of people are anxious to know just how real those performance improvements will be. After all, during his keynote spiel, we don't think Steve ever mentioned what sort of hardware he was using; for all we know, that was a prototype with dual 1.3 GHz G4s under the hood that launched Internet Explorer in "about a bounce."

Well, if you're looking for independent confirmation that the speed boosts shown at the Expo are very real indeed, look no further than Accelerate Your Mac; someone over there "acquired" (ahem) the 10.1 "Macworld Preview Pre-Release Build" and installed it on both an original Power Mac G4/733 (the SuperDrive model) and a Power Mac G4/533 dual-processor model. Both Macs launched applications two to five times faster than they did under Mac OS X 10.0.4, boot times are shorter by up to 18%, logins are faster, and Quake 3 framerates jumped by 12% to 26% depending on the game configuration. In other words, it's "wind in your hair" time in X-ville.

Granted, these aren't exactly "Rev. A iMac"-level systems, so your mileage may vary, but overall, we're pretty pleased with the verification of Steve's demonstrated speed boost. At first we were concerned that all of these wonderful speed increases were being observed on G4-class equipment, making us wonder how much of an improvement we'd see on our Altivec-less G3-powered gear, but in poking around AYM's forums, we found some very encouraging results from another fearless tester who had installed a couple of prerelease 10.1 builds on a beige G3-- okay, a G3 running at 533 MHz, but a G3 nonetheless. So it looks to us like Mac OS X users with Macs of all shapes and sizes can look forward to some pretty hefty speedups when 10.1 ships next month-- and for those of you keeping track, that means sometime when the next wiener dog is on the calendar.