Alright, call off the dogs, people-- we get the point: Mac OS X is going to be a-okay. Yesterday we unleashed a torrent of angst about how Apple was new to a game that others have been playing for years, with varying degrees of success: namely, putting a smiley face on a scary-looking behemoth. Up through Mac OS 9, the Mac's simplicity comes from within, but with Mac OS X, Apple faces the enormous challenge of grafting a simple user interface onto the infamously unfriendly substructure of Unix. The good news is that just about everyone thinks Apple is easily up to the task.

And while we agree on many points, like the assertion that Aqua is, if anything, easier for novices to learn than Mac OS 9's interface, our one remaining concern is this: no matter how pretty the outside looks, when the inside breaks, things may well get ugly really fast. That's something that Windows users have been used to for years; when it works, it's (cough) decent, but when it doesn't, run for cover and make sure your will is up to date. Now, one solution to this problem is simple: make sure nothing ever breaks. That may sound a bit glib, but is a bug-free operating system really such an impossibility? Sure, Mac OS X's only in beta right now, and it's evidently still possible to throw the system into intensely anxiety-inducing kernel panics, but so far, we personally haven't experienced a single system-level crash while running the beta.

So here's what we're going to do: we're going to shelve our natural pessimism for a while, and have faith that Apple's strongest point-- its obsessive attention to detail-- will mean that Aqua's glitz and user-friendliness will extend to those situations when things go wrong. We're going to trust that somehow Apple's either going to make nasty crashes a complete impossibility, or come up with some way to present such a crash in a manner less scary than technical jargon on a black screen. Because while the bomb icon was never a welcome sight, at least we didn't watch our whole user interface get yanked away and replaced with a blue screen filled with cryptic white hex code. (Running MacsBug meant a crash would give us a white screen filled with cryptic black hex code, but hey, we chose to set it up that way.)

In the meantime, as faithful viewer Russell Maggio pointed out, Adam Gillitt has finished his exhaustive compendium of Mac OS X beta testers' opinions for ZDNet, and the buzz is good. Very good. It's important to keep in mind that most of these people enthusiastically praising Mac OS X to the skies are power users instead of the iMac's target audience of first-time buyers, but this kind of reaction to a beta release bodes extremely well for Apple-- and us, of course. So here's looking forward to a perfect future.