Despite the widespread sentiment that Mac OS X still isn't quite ready for prime time (an assessment that we judge to be pretty darn valid, incidentally), we're still having a blast with our copy. Maybe it's just our natural unbridled pessimism, but we're always genuinely thrilled when we discover a hitherto unknown feature-- like the fact that we can actually print via AppleTalk to our ancient and hulking LaserWriter II. Sure, we've always been able to do that in the "classic" Mac OS, but seeing the words "Just Testing" come cranking out of that clunky old beast in 72-point Zapfino really put a song in our hearts.

Still, like we said, this operating system has its share of warts. While it's miles ahead of the public beta, it's still sorely lagging behind Mac OS 9.x in terms of features, drivers, software support, interoperability, and-- dare we say it?-- performance. Yeah, that's right, we said it, and we'll say it again. Performance. Mac OS X is slower than Mac OS 9.

Now, before the snipers line up their head shots and turn our squishy insides into squishy outsides, allow us to clarify: Mac OS X may be a speed demon at heart, but something about 10.0 feels downright sluggish on our 400 MHz Pismo. Maybe we're just overly demanding or charmingly retro, but we still harbor the delusion that nothing should feel sluggish on a 400 MHz G3. Nonetheless, the Genie Effect stutters, menus take their own sweet time to appear after we click, QuickTime performance is far less than perfect, iTunes can skip and its Visuals top out at about 7 frames per second, we spend way too much time staring at that damn spinning rainbow cursor, and everything just feels like it's covered in molasses. Lickable, indeed.

Is it just a temporary lack of hardware graphics acceleration in all but Apple's newest hardware, as faithful viewer John Franklin surmises? Maybe, but our distinct hope is that the slowdowns are primarily due to the presence of a ton of debugging code still present in the developmental 4K78 build that turned into Mac OS X 10.0. If that's the case, then hopefully a 10.0.1 update could do a lot to make things feel more responsive. Keep your fingers crossed, because Macworld indicates that Apple's first Mac OS X update is "imminent." Perhaps this is the legendary updater that Apple is rumored to have had ready last Saturday, but which didn't ship due to "marketing concerns."

Macworld claims that the 4MB update will be available sometime this week, probably via Software Update, iDisk, and plain ol' web download. Reportedly it patches "the Core Services directory," "SSH (secure shell) support," and AppleShare, in addition to adding a bunch of drivers and "Multimedia command sets." We've heard from a number of people that illicit copies of this patch are already making the rounds, and that it does indeed offer a noticeable performance boost. We're keeping our fingers crossed. Until then, we'll keep licking the screen, albeit slowly.