If you're spooked by the unfamiliar sound in the Mac world right about now, don't get too freaked out-- that's just silence. See, as a community we're in sort of a "quiet time" right now, for two reasons. First of all, we've got a post-Expo lull casting its soporific pall over everything, which always lands us squarely in Dullsville. To make matters worse, at the same time, the loudest among us are deeply entrenched in the process of, er, "testing" the public beta of Mac OS X. Which means that the faint buzz you hear in the background is the clicking of mice and the tapping of keys as Mac users the world over try to come to terms with this candy-colored operating system that Apple assures us is a huge step forward and the future of the Mac.

So while the tumbleweeds roll through the empty streets, geeks like us try to figure out what will happen to the world we know and love over the course of the next couple of years. When Mac OS X becomes the Mac OS "early next year" (we'll believe it when we see it, Steve), a lot of people are going to have to get used to an awful lot of changes. And the big reason that the Mac world seems so quiet to some of you right now is because you aren't tuning in to the right stations. That soft tapping and clicking is the sound of beta testers composing vast screeds about the Dock, the Classic environment, the lack of an Apple menu, etc. These days, all the noise is about the beta, and most of it is about how far Apple has to go before Mac OS X turns into something we'd feel comfortable putting in the hands of the average shmoe, or worse-- the average shmoe's parents.

If you want a break from the peace and quiet and would rather tune in to the overwhelming din of beta criticism (both positive and negative), try sampling MacInTouch's collection of reader reports. We warn you, though; metaphorically speaking, it's at least as long as, say, "Free Bird" or most Meat Loaf songs-- and you're only listening to Part 3. The thing that gets our stomachs turned the wrong way 'round is all the commentary about how much stuff doesn't work, how much stuff only works when the user really knows what he or she is doing, and how much of the innate complexity of Mac OS X's underpinnings still shows through the candy-colored facade.

Not that Mac OS 9 is exactly a paragon of Zen simplicity, mind you, and there are interface aspects of Mac OS X in its current form that are probably lots easier for novices to deal with-- such as the more rigid organizational structure of the file system, the Dock, and the new Finder. But in exchange for more simplicity on the surface (which many seasoned Mac veterans will find restrictive and chafing), Mac OS X also has a super-size dose of complexity roiling around in its guts, and it's imperative that Apple manages to prevent users from ever needing to go there. Your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff has been using Unix in various forms for ten or twelve years, now; when we took a peek under the hood of Mac OS X, we were somewhat tickled by being able to force-quit applications by grepping through a ps list for a pid and issuing a kill -9 from a terminal window-- but frankly, the thought of our less-geeky friends being exposed to this stuff has us reaching for the Maalox.

So in our opinion, the bottom line here is this: prior to Mac OS X, the Mac OS has been a fundamentally simpler solution for computer users who just want to get their computing done without all that tedious mucking about with the system's innards, while Windows has been "almost as good" by slapping a pretty (well, relatively speaking, anyway) face on top of a really nasty-looking substructure-- it's fine when it works, and a nightmare when it doesn't. Mac OS X seems to change all that, and now Apple has to play Microsoft's game by sticking an easy-to-use interface on top of a scary-looking-- though powerful-- engine. And the future of the Mac hinges almost entirely on how well Apple manages to pull this off. If anyone can do it, Apple can, but we'll say this: if Apple really does ship Mac OS X 1.0 "early next year" and it's actually something we'd like to put in front of our grandparents, we'll be pleasantly surprised. Or, more accurately, pleasantly amazed, stunned, and shocked into a state of catatonia. But you can be sure we'll be grinning like idiots until we recover.