So here we are, two days into the Mac's second era. Do things feel any different? We sort of expected world peace, an end to all known diseases, and serene glows on everyone's faces now that Mac OS X is here and the human race has therefore reached the pinnacle of elegance and technology. Instead, we're sensing a thrilling mix of giddy enthusiasm, careful confusion, and boundless frustration. That's okay with us, though, because we'll take the inherent drama of nervous ambivalence over the relative boredom of perfect bliss any day of the week. As everyone knows, life is dull without conflict.

What conflict, you ask? Well, we'll leave it to you to wade your way through the raging debate over whether Mac OS X is the best thing since frozen waffles or a bitter disappointment the likes of which the world hasn't seen since Highlander II: The Quickening. You can poke your head into the MacFixit forums, for example, if you'd like a little taste of the tussle. All we can do is tell you what we've been up to ever since the FedEx lady dropped off our Bundle O' Aqua early Saturday afternoon.

After basking in the beatific rays of the Mac OS X box for a short while, we slapped the main install CD into our Pismo and started scoping the READ MEs; after all, weren't installing a new calculator app, here-- this is an operating system, the big leagues, and we wanted to make sure it went as smoothly as possible. We made a mental note of the fact that we were supposed to update our firmware before installing Mac OS X, and then promptly forgot. (That may well have been a blessing in disguise; stay tuned for more on that fun little subject.) Our installation of the OS itself was fairly uneventful; our Pismo PowerBook already had one partition running Mac OS 9.1, and another blank HFS+ partition just waiting to be Xified. Perhaps twenty minutes later, we were oohing and aahing to the glory of the setup assistant.

That, however, is where we hit our first snag. After we entered all our data and the assistant tried to send our registration info over the 'net, things just kind of got stuck. After five minutes of staring at a "Connecting..." message, we forced the assistant to quit, found ourselves at the Mac OS X Desktop, and entered all the settings ourselves. Just a little bump in the road; nothing to worry about. In fact, after two solid days of hammering at this system for far longer than we should have, "little bumps" are the only problems we've encountered.

Okay, fine, so we dragged an alias out of the Dock and it left a puff of smoke floating permanently on the Desktop. So OmniWeb keeps crashing, sometimes even when it's just been sitting there idle. Classic takes a while to start up, and some applications (especially games) don't seem to work right. We can't paste new icons onto our hard drives (even after logging in as root). In Mail, any attempt to open a Deleted Items folder for a POP account (instead of the Mac.com IMAP account) yields a cryptic error message about that mailbox not being available. Drag and drop is still a little sketchy. Everything acts a little poky. And we're learning that there's something to be said for cooperative multitasking, because in Mac OS X we're able to make iTunes skip, and its Visuals are really slow and jerky-- and the "New Mail" alert sound often sounds like it's been run through a cheese grater if we're actively using another application and mail arrives.

But these are piddling concerns, for the most part, and they're more than offset by the astonishing amount of progress Apple has made in the half-year since the public beta hit the streets. We admit that the beta had us worried; to us, it just didn't feel like a Mac. But Mac OS X 10.0, while still far from perfect, does feel like a Mac to us. The Finder feels more like, well, the Finder. The Desktop pretty much acts like the Desktop. The attention to detail is astounding. Things generally behave the way we expect them to. The interface is gorgeous, and far more consistent than it was in the beta. And perhaps most impressive of all, we haven't had a single system-level crash since we first booted this PowerBook into Mac OS X two days ago.

So while a significant number of people seem to be less than thrilled with Apple's latest OS endeavor, you can count us among the duly impressed. If Apple went from the public beta to this shining gem in just six months, we're far less nervous about what the company will be shipping on all of its iMacs in four months' time. UNIX for the rest of us? You're darn tootin'. Four more months and we'd be perfectly comfortable calling this an operating system for mom... provided nothing goes wrong, of course.