It's March, and you know what that means: we can finally say that Mac OS X is shipping this month! Yes, Mac fans, our long, bitter struggle with seemingly ceaseless delays is finally drawing to a close. We've been dragging ourselves uphill through a dark, greased tunnel for many years, but the light is visible and it's getting brighter. Soon we'll be able to slap down $129 at the local software store, take home a boxed copy of Apple's long-awaited next-generation operating system, install it on our officially-compatible hardware, some angel somewhere will get its wings, and everyone will live happily ever after. As long as you don't need to watch a DVD.

As MacCentral reports, an Apple product manager has confirmed that Mac OS X 1.0 will not ship with DVD playback software. That means that once we upgrade our PowerBook to run Apple's Brave New OS, we're going to lose the capability to screen Chicken Run in the air between Boston and Chicago-- a practice that made our last flight a whole lot more enjoyable. Worse still, Mac OS X will probably initially ship sans iTunes and iMovie as well-- which means that "upgrading" our system will in fact temporarily eliminate our ability to run three of the applications we use most on that machine. (Looks like we'll be dual-booting for a while longer.)

The point, of course, is that those of you who are expecting a fairy tale ending to snap into place as soon as you quit the Mac OS X installer are setting yourselves up for some potentially emotionally-scarring disappointment. Surely you're aware that 1.0 applications are generally riddled with bugs, incompatibilities, unimplemented features, and the like, right? Well, what on earth makes you think that a 1.0 operating system is going to be any different? True, it's created by Apple; that's definitely a point in its favor. And it did have a lengthy public beta period during which Apple was able to work out plenty of kinks. But it's still the first official release of a new operating system, and given Murphy's Law, if the biggest problem you encounter is your inability to play the director's cut of Bring It On on your Cube, you should count yourself among the extremely lucky.

There are going to be bumps along the road. Mac OS X isn't so much a product as a process-- as most of you who have been waiting for the thing since Apple bought NeXT in 1996 are already probably well aware. It's going to take time before Mac OS X becomes the answer to the world's problems. Until then, Apple will keep plugging away at Mac OS X versions of its applications (you know Steve isn't going to ship Mac OS X iMacs this summer without iMovie and iTunes, so there's an upper bound for you), and we early adopters will pave the way for the rest of the planet. Personally, we don't mind a few inconveniences, because we know that Mac OS X is going to be something special, and we plan to stick with it as it turns into a mature system that takes the Mac community to the next level. And look on the bright side; can you imagine how many features we'd be missing if Apple had shipped Mac OS X last summer, as originally planned?