We admit it: despite its availability for a fortnight now, we, your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, still haven't bothered to upgrade a single Mac to Mac OS 9.1. At first it was just because Apple's servers were so overloaded, we didn't feel like wrestling with a kajillion other people to download 70 MB worth of patchy goodness spread out across fifteen files. Then we realized that our Mac OS 9.0.4 systems are actually pretty darn stable already. There's no way we're going to update the AtAT server, for example; the thing is a tank, and we really don't feel like endangering its rocklike stability for the sake of a "Windows" menu in the Finder. Maybe if Mac OS 9.1 had included Open Transport 3.0, as originally expected, we might have considered it-- but since the update shipped with a slew of planned features mysteriously absent, we're just not all that inclined to mess with a good thing.

Now, here's the question of the day: did Apple want us to feel this way? Think about it for a second; Mac OS 9.1, after months of delay, finally surfaced on the very day of Steve's last keynote-- yet Big Steve never mentioned it once. It's almost like Apple tried to sneak 9.1 in under the radar, while everyone was ooohing and aaahing over the titanium PowerBook G4, the refinements to Mac OS X, and the prospect of finally going faster than 500 MHz. Hey, think of it this way: iTunes was posted the same day, and since it required Mac OS 9, anyone who downloaded iTunes should also have downloaded Mac OS 9.1. But a week later, Apple bragged about iTunes passing the 275,000-download mark; how many copies of Mac OS 9.1 do you think made it out there in the same time frame?

What we're trying to figure out is whether Apple kept Mac OS 9.1's release low-key because it had to ship it stripped of so many features-- or if it stripped out those features to keep Mac OS 9.1 low-key in the first place. As faithful viewer David Triska first pointed out, AppleInsider is suggesting the latter; reportedly "certain technologies," such as the revamped and simplified Network control panel, OT 3.0, and improvements to the Memory Manager, were deliberately "witheld from the release to be packaged in a later update that will complement the official release of Mac OS X and act as a paid upgrade to consumers" whose Macs lack the oomph necessary to run OS X in all its candy-colored glory.

Note that we're not talking about removing features because they weren't done yet; AppleInsider's sources claim that Steve himself coldly ordered the amputation of several finished improvements from Mac OS 9.1. Whether those missing improvements just wind up on the cutting room floor forever (to make Mac OS X look even better by comparison?) or they surface in an upcoming Mac OS 9.5 release intended to bring in a little extra quarterly revenue, we admit that we're a little spooked by Steve's rumored willingness to axe a bunch of finished features as the means to some mysterious end. But hey, whether the rumors are true or not, they've sure got us paying attention...