Three days and counting-- and wouldn't you know it? CNET continues to complain about Mac OS X's missing features well in advance of the product making it out the door. Not long ago, Those Of The Yellow Sidebar issued a gloomy report focusing on the operating system's 1.0 warts, such as incomplete support for hardware graphics acceleration, performance bottlenecks, crashing problems, and-- horror of horrors-- its inability to play DVD movies. Not that any of those issues should be dismissed as acceptable, but come on; can we at least wait until today's media briefing takes place before we jump down Apple's throat?

Evidently the answer is a deafening "no," at least as far as CNET is concerned; after milking the showstopper "no DVD movies" issue for all it was worth, those folks have moved onto bigger and better feature omissions-- such as a lack of CD-RW support. Here we had finally come to terms with not being able to watch Coyote Ugly on our Mac OS X-booted PowerBook (we're recovering nicely from the ensuing stroke, thank you very much), and now it turns out that we won't be able to burn CDs, either? "Sources have previously said the new OS will not permit DVD playback or recording, but its inability to record CDs was not clear until now." Fetch the heart pills, Mabel, 'cause our left arms are going numb!

Seriously, let us get this straight; despite knowing full well that Mac OS X doesn't yet support DVD-ROM drives-- hardware that's been shipping in several Macs for years, now-- we're supposed to be surprised that the operating system doesn't yet support CD-RW drives which have only been shipping in Macs since January? Maybe we're just overly-realistic when it comes to teeny little efforts like a decade-long attempt to overhaul an operating system that hasn't changed its guts since 1984, but somehow the "news" that Mac OS X doesn't yet fully support a system component that's only been shipping for a whopping two months utterly fails to fill us with consternation and uproar.

We know, we know... Apple has been flooding the airwaves with its "Rip. Mix. Burn." message, and it's slightly incongruous that its new operating system isn't yet a part of that story. Believe us, the irony is not lost on us. At the same time, though, we fully appreciate that there's a reason Apple isn't shipping Macs with Mac OS X pre-loaded for another four months, just as there's a reason why the operating system's Saturday rollout will be low-key. Call us ol' softies, but we'll reserve the frothing moral outrage for really nasty stuff, like perhaps a kernel panic and crash that irreparably corrupts our separate Mac OS 9 partition-- we don't plan to waste it on a temporary delay in burning CDs and watching movies.