As the Apple Turns: Scene 2744: All Behind Closed Doors (12/15/00)

All Behind Closed Doors (12/15/00)

Apparently the "Ask And Ye Shall Receive" Fairy has seen fit to bless the AtAT studios with her divine and sparkly presence. Just yesterday we mourned the lack of publicly available information on Apple's progress in nurturing the sapling public beta into a mighty, towering Mac OS X 1.0-- and hours later, we received word from faithful viewer Mentholiptus that Mac OS Rumors has dished the dirt on post-public-beta internal builds. How's that for speedy delivery? We haven't gotten service this fast since... well, since lunch, actually. But still, we're mighty impressed.

So here's the scoop according to MOSR,: the controversial 2E14 build, which some people claim includes performance optimizations (while others stridently deny that fact), reportedly does run "up to twice as fast" on selected hardware. However, 2E14 came out months ago, and more recent builds still hidden behind Uncle Steve's Veil of Secrecy are "much faster" still. If you believe MOSR's sources, current builds of Mac OS X contain Altivec optimizations, a more-developed Quartz 2D graphics architecture, and a lot less performance-killing debugging code; the upshot is that applications are now running faster than ever. Reportedly Photoshop is up to 25% zippier in the current beta builds than in the original public beta.

Better yet, for those of you who continue to have nightmares about RAM requirements, Mac OS X's memory usage is rumored to be "down almost 30%" since September's initial release. By our calculations, that means 90 MB instead of 128 MB-- but then again, it ain't over yet, and even the original public beta ran pretty well in 64 MB of RAM, provided that Classic never entered the picture. It sounds like Apple might be able to stick to the 64 MB minimum requirement after all.

Keep in mind that all this is rumor about internal-only builds. We should also mention that the mystical, magical 2E14 build (which MOSR describes as "the more recent Developer seed of the Public Beta) apparently isn't a developer-only release at all; several non-developer AtAT viewers have written in claiming that their own copies of the public beta (purchased more than a month after its initial release) claim to be 2E14 in the "About This Macintosh" window. That might explain why some users complain that the public beta is painfully slow, while others can't figure out why some people are whining so much. Check your version and compare your experience-- it's easy and fun!

In any case, it sounds like we were right in supposing that Steve is keeping Mac OS X improvements under his big, mysterious hat until he's ready to wow the world-- either at next month's Macworld Expo Stevenote, or at this rumored February 24th "special event," or whenever the heck the fancy strikes him. Hey, what are you gonna do? The man's mercurial; get over it, already.

SceneLink (2744)

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The above scene was taken from the 12/15/00 episode:

December 15, 2000: Rumor has it that Apple's internal Mac OS X builds are burning up the racetrack. Meanwhile, the company's ever-lovable lawyers order a Linux site to remove its Aqua-looking themes, and Microsoft is the latest to jump on the reduced earnings bandwagon...

Other scenes from that episode:

2745: Not Winning Any Friends (12/15/00) It's been a while since Apple's crack legal team made an appearance on the show, and the fans are getting restless. "Where are the lawsuits against iMac copycats?" they ask. "Where are the cease-and-desist orders against well-meaning but technically copyright-infringing web sites?"...
2746: Even The Mighty Shall Fall (12/15/00) Remember back when Apple issued that nasty ol' earnings warning, and several analysts said that the problem was Apple-specific instead of indicating an industry-wide slowdown? Well, since then, earnings across the entire personal computer market have been falling like dominoes, and we find ourselves searching for a word like "wrong" but times a million...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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