As the Apple Turns: Scene 2602: Looking Beyond The Beta (10/10/00)

Looking Beyond The Beta (10/10/00)

The Mac OS X public beta has been kicking around for about a month now, and that's been plenty of time to get a sense of the operating system's, er, "weaker points." Most complaints seem to focus on performance issues; some aspects of the beta, such as the swoopy Genie effect, stutter noticeably on Macs towards the bottom of the "supported hardware" food chain, while others, such as live window resizing, are dog slow even on faster hardware. And that's on systems that comply with the beta's seemingly outrageous requirement of 128 MB of RAM. What'll happen when the final version ships and people want to install it on their 64 MB standard iBooks?

Of course, the old "it's only a beta" excuse only goes so far; eventually we need to know just what that really means. What's not in the beta that's going to be included in the final release? Luckily for us, faithful viewer William Bonde forwarded us an interesting ZDNet article in which Adam Gillitt chats with an Apple rep about just that very subject. Director of Mac OS Product Marketing Ken Bereskin may not be in the trenches churning out code, and he may be one of those dreaded "marketing" people so you should take his comments with a couple of shakers of salt, but hey, at least it's something.

According to Ken, Apple hasn't yet fully leveraged the possibilities of the most modern Mac hardware to optimize the Mac OS X user experience. There's only partial Velocity Engine support in the beta, so all those whiz-bang effects like the Genie deal and live resizing should get lots faster on G4 equipment. Does that mean G3 users are out of luck, stuck with a "what you see is what you'll get" scenario? Hardly; window performance is "a work in progress" and the development team hasn't "finished optimization by any stretch"; most notably, for some effects, there's apparently zero hardware acceleration of Mac OS X graphics performance on certain Macs right now. The goal is apparently to make absolutely sure that when it's done, Mac OS X will run "well" on "first- or second-generation iMacs that have 233 or 266 MHz processors." So in theory, even those very first Bondi Blue buddies should be able to run Mac OS X (provided they've had their RAM upgraded from the base 32 MB).

Speaking of the memory issue, Apple has said all along that the 128 MB minimum is a requirement of the beta, not of the final operating system itself; Bereskin confirms once again that when Mac OS X ships, it'll be "able to run on lower memory configurations." We expect that means that the box will list 64 MB of RAM as the final minimum, though performance will degrade due to increased reliance on everyone's favorite slowdown factor, virtual memory. That said, we should note that we installed and ran the beta on a 64 MB PowerBook for a few days before our RAM upgrade showed up, and we didn't even notice the difference. Of course, we also hadn't been using the Classic environment, which is currently what makes that 128 MB limit more realistic. But by the time Mac OS X ships, we won't need Classic, because everything will be Carbonized. Right? Right?

SceneLink (2602)

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From the writer/creator of AtAT, a Pandemic Dad Joke taken WAYYYYYY too far

The above scene was taken from the 10/10/00 episode:

October 10, 2000: Scarcely a week after Apple's disastrous earnings warning, sales veep Mitch Mandich announces that he's retiring-- coincidence? Meanwhile, an Apple rep describes the differences between today's Mac OS X public beta and next year's final product, and word has it that neither Microsoft nor Cisco paid any federal taxes last year...

Other scenes from that episode:

2601: Really Amazing Timing (10/10/00) Apple watchers with an overly-developed sense of corporate bloodlust were licking their chops when word of the infamous earnings warning came over the wire. So Apple would miss its quarterly estimates by up to 30% or so-- surely the red stuff should have flowed through the streets of Cupertino in the days to follow, right?...
2603: 0% Taxation, 100% Legal (10/10/00) We've said it before and we'll say it again: your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff is clueless when it comes to matters of high finance and the finer points of modern capitalism in action. For example, we don't really know how the stock market works, but we like to watch the pretty red and green numbers go up and down...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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