And indeed, even when Macs had faster hardware (early PowerPC), the Objective-C crippled performance. Windows crashed a lot (like Mac did before OS X), but it was fast because it had no isolation between components.
There was no Objective-C in Apple software in the days of "when Macs had faster hardware (early PowerPC)." The state-of-the art at OS X's release was the fourth-generation PowerPC, and there was only one more major iteration of the PowerPC used in Macs. I would call this "later PowerPC." "Early PowerPC" Macs couldn't run OS X.
