So here we are, two days into the Mac's second era. Do things feel any different? We sort of expected world peace, an end to all known diseases, and serene glows on everyone's faces now that Mac OS X is here and the human race has therefore reached the pinnacle of elegance and technology. Instead, we're sensing a thrilling mix of giddy enthusiasm, careful confusion, and boundless frustration. That's okay with us, though, because we'll take the inherent drama of nervous ambivalence over the relative boredom of perfect bliss any day of the week. As everyone knows, life is dull without conflict.

What conflict, you ask? Well, we'll leave it to you to wade your way through the raging debate over whether Mac OS X is the best thing since frozen waffles or a bitter disappointment the likes of which the world hasn't seen since Highlander II: The Quickening. You can poke your head into the MacFixit forums, for example, if you'd like a little taste of the tussle. All we can do is tell you what we've been up to ever since the FedEx lady dropped off our Bundle O' Aqua early Saturday afternoon.

After basking in the beatific rays of the Mac OS X box for a short while, we slapped the main install CD into our Pismo and started scoping the READ MEs; after all, weren't installing a new calculator app, here-- this is an operating system, the big leagues, and we wanted to make sure it went as smoothly as possible. We made a mental note of the fact that we were supposed to update our firmware before installing Mac OS X, and then promptly forgot. (That may well have been a blessing in disguise; stay tuned for more on that fun little subject.) Our installation of the OS itself was fairly uneventful; our Pismo PowerBook already had one partition running Mac OS 9.1, and another blank HFS+ partition just waiting to be Xified. Perhaps twenty minutes later, we were oohing and aahing to the glory of the setup assistant.

That, however, is where we hit our first snag. After we entered all our data and the assistant tried to send our registration info over the 'net, things just kind of got stuck. After five minutes of staring at a "Connecting..." message, we forced the assistant to quit, found ourselves at the Mac OS X Desktop, and entered all the settings ourselves. Just a little bump in the road; nothing to worry about. In fact, after two solid days of hammering at this system for far longer than we should have, "little bumps" are the only problems we've encountered.

Okay, fine, so we dragged an alias out of the Dock and it left a puff of smoke floating permanently on the Desktop. So OmniWeb keeps crashing, sometimes even when it's just been sitting there idle. Classic takes a while to start up, and some applications (especially games) don't seem to work right. We can't paste new icons onto our hard drives (even after logging in as root). In Mail, any attempt to open a Deleted Items folder for a POP account (instead of the Mac.com IMAP account) yields a cryptic error message about that mailbox not being available. Drag and drop is still a little sketchy. Everything acts a little poky. And we're learning that there's something to be said for cooperative multitasking, because in Mac OS X we're able to make iTunes skip, and its Visuals are really slow and jerky-- and the "New Mail" alert sound often sounds like it's been run through a cheese grater if we're actively using another application and mail arrives.

But these are piddling concerns, for the most part, and they're more than offset by the astonishing amount of progress Apple has made in the half-year since the public beta hit the streets. We admit that the beta had us worried; to us, it just didn't feel like a Mac. But Mac OS X 10.0, while still far from perfect, does feel like a Mac to us. The Finder feels more like, well, the Finder. The Desktop pretty much acts like the Desktop. The attention to detail is astounding. Things generally behave the way we expect them to. The interface is gorgeous, and far more consistent than it was in the beta. And perhaps most impressive of all, we haven't had a single system-level crash since we first booted this PowerBook into Mac OS X two days ago.

So while a significant number of people seem to be less than thrilled with Apple's latest OS endeavor, you can count us among the duly impressed. If Apple went from the public beta to this shining gem in just six months, we're far less nervous about what the company will be shipping on all of its iMacs in four months' time. UNIX for the rest of us? You're darn tootin'. Four more months and we'd be perfectly comfortable calling this an operating system for mom... provided nothing goes wrong, of course.

While our own personal experience with Mac OS X 10.0 (yecch, we still say it should be 1.0) so far has been relatively painless and chock-full of grins, there are plenty of others out there who seem to be having a tougher time of it. Yes, you heard us right: Mac OS X isn't a perfect and blissful ascension to nirvana. For some people, it's been downright aggravating-- we're getting reports of botched installs requiring reformats and reinstalls, Classic environments that just don't work, and more... and we're also hearing from several people that Apple's tech support line is getting a lot more calls than the company anticipated.

Just for fun, try this: head over to Apple's Tech Info Library, do a search on "Mac OS X 10.0," and scroll through the 75 articles that pop up. They aren't all descriptions of known bugs, but they'll definitely give you a good sense that Mac OS X does include its fair share of "issues." Can you say "work in progress"? We knew you could. But Apple set a ship date (finally) and met it, bugs and all-- and now the Mac OS X development team is hard at work cranking out code to tighten things up even further. (You didn't think they've just been sitting around playing Go Fish since Mac OS X went golden master, did you?)

Now this is interesting; Think Secret claims that Apple actually had a Mac OS X bug-fix update ready to go even on the eve of the product's official launch. That makes perfect sense, since Apple's development team has had weeks to make improvements since the "final" version got shipped off to the CD-ROM factory, and the gold master wasn't even the latest development build at the time. So Apple could very well have had a downloadable updater (or something that worked through the Software Update architecture) ready to patch the commercial version to 10.0.1 right when customers started installing their 10.0 versions on Saturday.

However, that rumored update never surfaced, allegedly because the company "made a last-minute decision to wait a bit-- possibly a week or more-- before releasing it." Why, you ask? Thank the pantheon of Marketing Deities, who, in their infinite wisdom, reportedly decided that "releasing the final version and an update on the same day could easily cultivate a negative impression of the release." Oh, good. Because, you know, waiting a week while the press publishes stinker reviews of the product due to bugs that Apple has already fixed (not to mention fostering negative word-of-mouth by customers unnecessarily afflicted by said bugs) is a much better strategy. Hey Apple, we know this is only a rumor, but just in case it's true, here's our advice: 1) Ship the update. 2) Sack the genius who decided that not fixing bugs in a timely fashion is the key to good publicity.

Back to that Firmware Update we so utterly forgot to install before subjecting our PowerBook to the rigors of Mac OS X... As it turns out, we don't appear to have needed it, because luckily, OS X seems to be running fine. In fact, we really don't need it, because we've already got as little RAM as we want-- our 192 MB is little enough for our modest needs, and we don't feel any particular desire to drop down to 64 MB. But it was nice of Apple to give us the option.

We're sorry, are we confusing you? We should clarify. Apple PowerBook Firmware 4.1.8 (just like its non-PowerBook firmware brethren) claims to improve "FireWire target disk mode, network booting, gigabit networking (on systems with gigabit hardware), and system stability." In addition, though, also like its brethren, in some situations it apparently disables third-party RAM modules. As the Mac Observer notes, not all non-Apple RAM is affected, but if you've got some aftermarket RAM purring under the hood of your Mac and you install Apple's latest firmware, the odds are decent that after restarting you'll find your extra memory has vanished. Hey presto, instant RAM reduction!

We'd like to thank faithful viewer William Carlson, who was the first to point out this handy undocumented feature. If we someday discover that elves have done a phantom upgrade on our Pismo and we suddenly have too much RAM installed-- perhaps an unseemly 512 MB or so-- now we know how to remedy the situation. Why flip back the keyboard to remove the RAM manually and risk damaging vital components, when Apple's firmware update can accomplish much the same thing with a minimum of muss and fuss?

Of course, some people are never happy, and instead of thanking Apple for relieving them of their excess RAM burden, they're crying bloody murder. Word has it that Apple's official response to these incessant whiners is that there's no way to "downgrade" to an earlier firmware version, and that it's "up to the third party RAM vendors" to make the memory magically reappear. Our interpretation of this stance is that Apple's firmware update only eliminates "evil" RAM, whereas all the RAM sold via the Apple Store is in fact Certified Good™ and blessed by a bevy of holy personages representing a wide cross-section of the world's religions before it's factory-installed. (Why do you think Apple charges so much?) They're just looking out for your karma, man.