Over the past few days I’ve spent much time taking photos of holiday family events. I’ve processed these hundreds of images with my MacBook Pro and Aperture. In the past I found Aperture unbearably slow, bringing frustration and anger in place of what should have been speed and ease of use. However, with the 1.5 update, and most recent 1.5.2 patch, it seems that Apple has greatly improved the speed of Aperture.
Imports are speedy, using the loupe provides almost instant magnification, switching between projects or albums is very responsive, and application launch time seems improved. Image adjustments and previews are not nearly as fast as they could/should be, but even they have come a long way as well.
If you’ve been thinking about Aperture as a post-production solution, or have a camera which shoots RAW images (pretty much any DSLR or high-end point and shoot), then I would strongly recommend giving Aperture a try. It’s come a long way.
This hasn't been my experience. I manage over 50,000 photos in my Aperture library, and the more I add, the slower it seems to get a basic tasks such as just switching from one photo to th other to view... :-(