Pros: Aqua interface is elegant and productive, Darwin core is stable and familiar
Cons: Lack of apps at this time. Dual OS hot swapping takes time
The Bottom Line: MacOS X is a platform with enormous potential but getting one right now is rather pointless unless you want to get acquainted with Aqua or Darwin.
amadeusb4's Full Review: Apple Mac OS 10 Full Version (M7686LL/A)
The Act
Ever since owning a Commodore64 in the eighties, I have been a staunch Wintel PC user, which is exactly why even I was surprised at what happened yesterday morning. I walked into Fry's to pick up a paper shredder and this year's version of Turbo Tax and walked out with an Apple G4 Cube and Mac OS X as well.
We're talking Saul on the way to Damascus epiphany here. Direct communion with God. Instantaneous enlightenment. Immediate Nirvana. There's simply no other way to describe a lazy Saturday morning where I'm suddenly and vehemently executing a $2,700 transaction for a Mac. This was such a powerful moment that I didn't even pursue killing the bastard who put a dent in my car out in the parking lot. Instead, I was the cause of coffee burns and donut stains on state trooper uniforms on the way home as I weaved through 70 mph traffic as if the other cars were nothing but orange road cones.
Car trunk lid and apartment door open, I took to unpacking the Cube as if it were a vital transplant organ waiting to save some senators life. Desk clearing, cable routing and connections happened without even registering in my memory. Manuals were tossed aside like grocery shopping bags. Relief finally came in the form of a very gratifying choir of sounds indicating that the system was booting. A form wizard led me through the setup process and off I was discovering the exotic world of Macintosh computing. This was the pre-installed MacOS9.1 mind you and I spent as much time on it as the Grizwalds did sightseeing The Grand Canyon.
MacOS X
In goes the OS X CD. The Cube surprises me with a whirring noise as the CD spins up (this computer is otherwise silent) and the install sequence begins. Upon seeing "31 minutes remaining", I decided to use this opportunity to grab some fast food. When I got back, the system had completed and another form wizard was waiting for me. My enthusiasm dampened slightly when I noticed that this was the exact same wizard, albeit in Aqua guise, that MacOS9.1 had led me through barely an hour ago. I guess that even the geniuses at Apple never foresaw first time buyers taking the plunge not only into the Mac world but also into a their new earth shattering OS. Oh well.
I bet you're thinking now, "Nothing short of a system hangup will discourage this crazy nut." Well, that's exactly what happened next. The system went to post my registration info with Apple and it just hung there. Sounds of Hal saying, "Just a moment... just a moment..." went through my head and I wondered exactly how long I should sit there and allow the lobotomy to continue. Eventually, I reached over and tapped the power button and then tapped it again. To my surprise, however, nothing happened. The system just came back to life right where it left off, in its happy coma land. So after satisfying myself that it was indeed coming back up into the same state and therefore not really shutting down but going into some sort of sleep mode, I did what I haven't done since owning that Commodore. I pulled the plug.
Fortunately, that has been the worst experience so far. The system come up and initialized fine afterwards and after a short period of fiddling with Aqua settings and setting up the keyboard for Dvorak, I was off and running.
Initially, I wanted to see how it did on the internet. After all MS Explorer 5.1 is the only major application currently available for OS X. The single button mouse took me a while to get used to. I'm not a mouse fan but this little gizmo is pretty neat. Purely optical, it uses any pattern around to sense motion. The smooth white instruction manual covers throw it off a bit and I noticed the x axis being less sensitive, so I just went back to using the top of my desk as the mouse pad. In no time at all, I had multiple sessions of Explorer open while simultaneously downloading and playing mpegs in the background. Such use led to Explorer dying but this was actually quite encouraging because the system hardly even noticed.
And this brings me to the first technical point of this review. MacOS X is based on BSD Unix. Yes, you can actually get a terminal window up and browse through the file system with Unix commands. I was thrilled to no end by getting a text status of the system with the old familiar ps command. It reminded me of my college days of Sun Sparc stations with various X window environments. And that's really how I think of this system, a stable POSIX compliant core with a fancy Mac like GUI thrown on top. There is a hitch however. There's some psychedelic weirdness involved when you have to run what Apple has decided to call Classic applications. This is why MacOS X actually comes with a full version of MacOS 9.1 on an additional CD, because when an app which cannot run under X shows up, the system just hot boots 9.1. This may sound nice, but it's rather messy. First of all, initializing 9.1 can take as much as a minute on my 450MHz 256MB G4 Cube (or the system can boot into both at startup but then 9.1 will hog some resources). Another catch then is that if you encounter problems in your 9.1 apps, they can very well bring the system down because there's no protected memory space in 9.1. So in a sense, just running one stupid 9.1 text editor can negate all the effort Apple has put into OS X. Plus, the classic apps run slower, but my take on this is that Apple and Macolytes had to swallow the pill, take the bullet, eat their poison, whatever, sometime.
With current market share, the MacOS was heading nowhere fast. Java hasn't been working its magic to render OS boundaries meaningless, so they had to do something. Despite Gate's very honorable investment in Apple, there's still a lot of aversion towards Microsoft. So it's only natural that a Unix platform was chosen to carry Mac computers into the future and I fully agree and appreciate their choice. So, in a sense, Apple has leapfrogged Linux to bring a Unix environment to the general computing public.
It's a lot easier to jump into coding apps for MacOS X if companies know that with a little tweaking they can also get into Unix markets as well. Which leaves me hoping that OS X will see a lot of development activity quickly because right now there is practically nothing to run on it. Apple is even trying to jump start this by including a development kit with this product.
Going through the half hour installation of the OS X Development Kit, I encountered another weird effect. The mouse pointer just disappeared. At first I thought the system had locked up again but then I noticed that I was able to actually do stuff "blind", so I rebooted the system which takes about 90 seconds. The best part I like about the boot sequence is that when you see the desktop appear, the computer has finished booting. This is a welcome change from Wintel machines which tease you by bringing up the desktop but continuing to boot. The sleep mode is also nice. Getting in and out of sleep mode takes only several seconds and in terms of power consumption is practically the same as shutting the system down.
Features
Aqua not only provides nice visual candy, but also includes some cool productivity features. Grazing on Microsoft hey for a good part of my life, my first impression of the Dock was that it's a nice gee-whiz gizmo. But after spending some time with it, I learned how elegant and useful it is. You can dock frequently used apps, files, folders and such there. It will also show what's currently running. Minimized windows as well as the trash exist on the dock. If this doesn't sound all that impressive, it's because you need to experience the elegance with which the dock functions. If the Window's Start bar is a 300lb. defensive lineman, then MacOS X dock is Jackie Chan.
MacOS X surpasses any operating system in ease and efficiency of browsing files. Again, not because of cutesy features but because of fundamental ideas. The Finder, Mac's file explorer program, can be configured to view directory structure in a very novel way. This enables you to quickly see where you're going as well as where you've been without cluttering your window with the entire directory structure. Although I've never seen Motif Window Manager run this way, it looks a lot like it. The other nice feature is that you can incorporate any folder into the dock and then be able to browse its contents and the contents of sub-folders right from the dock without ever opening it, much like you would browse the contents of the Windows Start bar. The difference here is that you are rifling through files and folders without ever opening any window or utility to do so. I found putting my home directory there very useful.
The Verdict
The final word is that MacOS X is a platform with enormous potential but getting one right now is rather pointless. I got it because I was buying a Cube and Fry's offered it free with a computer purchase as part of their release day promo. Unless you want to get acquainted with Aqua or Darwin (the BSD Unix core), there's no reason to buy it yet. It can only run MS Explorer 5.1 and Quicktime5.0 natively and the downloadable doodads from the web are rather pointless. You'll find yourself booting into 9.1 most of the time. I can now understand Apple's reserve in shipping it pre-installed on new systems. Upgrading an older system to OS X can be rough because of the system requirements. Most of the Macolytes at Fry's winced when hearing the memory (128MB) and HD space (1GB) requirements. Not very demanding by today's standards but certainly inconvenient if you bought your system years ago.
Mac OS will give your Macintosh a dramatic new look and feel, along with all kinds of enhanced capabilities for accessing the Internet. It will also s...More at eBay
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