[oblique63]

Then Lion came along and slowed things down to a crawl. Definitely the slowest OSX release I've had on my old macbook (circa '08). I eventually downgraded back to snow leopard until mountain lion came out, which was noticeably faster than Lion, but still not quite as smooth as snow leopard. But now Mavericks is back to being pretty good.

All-in-all, still not a very straightforward 'improvement' path performance-wise -- at least not from the end consumer's point of view.