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Waiting For Buzzwords (7/6/99)
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Look, do not get us wrong-- we absolutely love Mac OS 8.6. In fact, we love it more than we loved Mac OS 8.5, which we loved more than 8.1, which we loved a lot more than 8.0, which in turn stole a place in our heart from 7.6, which-- well, you get the point. At any given point in time, the current Mac OS seems to be the pinnacle of elegance and ease of use. In fact, we're going to have to agree with Robert Morgan when he says that the Mac OS interface is Apple's brand. Take it from us-- the Mac OS is more of the Macintosh than the physical Mac is. After all, the only time we're reminded that our Power Tower Pro clone isn't a bona fide Mac is when we have to open the thing up to install RAM or a new hard drive, and we slice open our fingers on the cheap metal case and hurt ourselves trying to cut the covers off the drive bays. But say Apple started selling a blue and white Power Mac G3 running Windows 98. Would that be a Mac? Yeah, right.
Now, as nifty as the current Mac OS is on the outside, it still leaves a bit to be desired when it comes to what's under the hood. Apple's been trying for about a decade now to come up with a more "modern" operating system that really makes Mac hardware shine; while 8.6 is easy to use and a joy to work with, it still doesn't do pre-emptive multitasking, true memory protection, symmetric multiprocessing, modern I/O, and all those other buzzwords. You may think you don't need them, and maybe you don't; after all, we're pretty happy with our Macs' performance as things stand, too. But the bottlenecks in the Mac OS are robbing your Mac of the performance it should rightly be enjoying, and that's where Mac OS X comes in. Its promise is to be as elegant and easy to use as the current Mac OS we all know and love, while having all those great buzzwords that will let you and your Mac perform to your fullest. Fewer crashes. More speed than you ever imagined. Good stuff like that.
Mac OS X is still a ways out (we don't count Mac OS X Server, which has the buzzwords but not the interface), but it's coming. If you want a taste of what's in store, you'll definitely want to check out Mac OS Rumors, which has a fairly detailed report of the latest developer preview release. If you don't think those buzzwords are so important, you should know that performance in some applications was twice as fast under this early build of Mac OS X than under today's Mac OS 8.6. Now that's something to look forward to.
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SceneLink (1643)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 7/6/99 episode: July 6, 1999: Secrecy is key, and Apple's reportedly lying to its own employees as part of a massive deliberate misinformation campaign. Meanwhile, Apple's lab dwellers continue to chip away at Mac OS X, and some new charts imply some interesting things about Apple's shifting demographic...
Other scenes from that episode: 1642: Psst-- Don't Tell Anyone (7/6/99) "But AtAT," friends ask, "now that Apple's pretty much back on its feet, whatever shall you do when the drama starts to fade?" Oh, please-- there's more drama coming out of Apple than we know what to do with, and there's no sign of the well running dry anytime soon... 1644: Numbers Don't Lie (7/6/99) The thing about statistics is this: they carry an inherent authority. When the average person hears that 67% of American college graduates have never owned a cat, he or she will take that information as gospel, because obviously if some poor soul went to all the trouble of being so scientific and painstakingly tabulating data about cat ownership, well, then they must be correct...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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