Pros: Unix power and stability, Macintosh usability and application support.
Cons: Unix system resource requirements, Macintosh interface flexibility.
The Bottom Line: OS X delivers a mix of stability, usability and applications previously available at any price. It is not perfect, but is already better than anything else out there.
dbirchall's Full Review: Apple Mac OS 10 Full Version (M7686LL/A)
When I told my friends I'd bought a Macintosh, they were stunned. After all, for the decade-plus I've been working with computers, I'd never once owned a Mac, and had generally been of the rather well-informed opinion, based on using them, that they were over-priced, under-powered crash-prone buckets of bits that couldn't properly multitask their way out of wet paper bags armed with box-cutters.
Nobody ever gave me much of an argument when I said those sorts of mean and hurtful things about their beloved Macs. They knew I was right, and they knew I'd used just about every other kind of hardware and operating system out there and was speaking from experience. I'd even used - oh, the horror! - A/UX, Apple's brief foray into Unix years and years ago. And systems made by NeXT, the company Steve Jobs went to after he left Apple.
But neither of those impressed me all that much. For the last half-decade, I'd been very much a Linux user. After all, Linux was just about the most stable, flexible system out there with anything even resembling decent application support. And though I never got around to running Linux/PPC on a Mac, I'd run other versions on PC's and RISC systems.
So me, using a Mac, was about as believable as the sky suddenly being green with a purple sun. But it was true, due to two things which happened earlier this year.
First, Apple introduced their new iBook notebooks, which were smaller, lighter, faster, and had better features than their predecessors, and more importantly, were $500 cheaper than any equivalent system in the PC world.
Second, and most importantly, Apple finally introduced the spiritual heir to NeXTStep - OS X. This, the latest and definitely greatest version of the Mac operating system, features an open-source BSD Unix core called Darwin, a NeXTStep-derived software library called Cocoa, an updated "look and feel" known as Aqua, and Quartz, a stunning window manager based on Adobe's PDF format.
I, of course, cared mostly about the whole BSD side of things. Along with Linux, and before I discovered Linux, I'd used FreeBSD and BSDI BSD/OS (and a whole mess of other Unix flavors from big names like IBM, Sun, HP, and SGI), so I was very comfortable with that area.
I wasn't exactly uncomfortable with Macs, although it had been a couple years since I really used one much at a job. After all, it's hard to click the wrong button when there's only one button to click!
A month after the first major revision of OS X (10.1) came out, Apple introduced faster 600-megahertz versions of the iBook, and I promptly bought one of the original 500-megahertz models on clearance. Hey, I'm cheap. It came with OS X 10.0.3, and I immediately upgraded to 10.0.4, which was... less than stable.
After managing to hang the system about once a day for three days, I dashed over to the local Macintosh dealer and got the free CD to upgrade to 10.1. That was a few weeks back - and it's now been over two weeks since I last rebooted my computer. That's the sort of "uptime" I've grown accustomed to in the Unix and Linux worlds - and wouldn't dream of on a Mac running anything before OS X 10.1. Or, for that matter, a PC running anything other than Linux or Unix.
So... stability? It's got it, in spades. Sure, the occasional application crashes, but the underlying OS simply does not care, nor should it. If this weren't stable, I wouldn't use it, period, full stop.
But Linux was stable too - so why switch? Well, there was that little matter of the iBook having an insanely great price. But more seriously, while Linux's application support is constantly improving, there are still very few big-name programs available for it outside the Internet space. There are programs from Corel, and StarOffice from Sun, and... well, that's about it. And certain applications - like playing DVD's - are still kind of "for hackers only." I don't have the time to recompile the kernel right now, sorry.
On OS X 10.1, things like QuickTime, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and DVD playback don't require any dark magic - it comes with them, and they just plain work. Finally, all those movie trailers are viewable - and so are the movies themselves, once they come out on DVD. Yet at the same time, many of my favorite Linux applications are available as well. Mozilla 0.9.5, with the tab-based interface option and ChatZilla IRC client, runs just fine on the iBook with OS X, as well as on the Dell Linux laptop I use at work. Terminals are terminals. And I even installed an X Window server, so I can run all my favorite X applications, like The GIMP, even before they're "fully" ported to the OS X interface.
I should note that OS X comes with a built-in OS 9 layer as well, called "Classic." Basically, if you want to run an older Mac application, Classic starts up, and your system runs both OS X and OS 9 at the same time. I hardly ever even touch Classic, and when I do it's usually because I don't realize something I've downloaded doesn't work on OS X. But it's nice to know it's there, and for people familiar with the older Macintosh operating systems, it's probably a big plus.
Long-time Mac users will probably notice that OS X doesn't feel quite as fast as OS 9. This is definitely true - it's a much more "enterprise grade" operating system, designed to do multiple things, potentially for multiple people, without crashing. As such, it's probably bigger. And that stunning new interface - drop-shadows around windows, anyone? - has got to take some processor power to render. It's not recommended for anything less than a PowerPC G3 processor with 128 megabytes of RAM. That's not a lot to ask, though - the bottom end of Apple's line is now basically a 500 megahertz G3 with 128 megabytes of RAM (expandable to 640 megabytes) and more expensive models feature higher-speed G4 chips and much more RAM.
The caveat - and it's really a trivial one - for folks coming over from the Linux side, like me, is that the user interface is a little less flexible than we're used to. There is an Apple Way Of Doing Things when it comes to user interfaces, and it doesn't change a lot. It was big news when OS X 10.1 actually allowed the application dock to be placed on the sides of the screen instead of the bottom. Ooh! On the other hand, the X Window system can be installed atop OS X and run at the same time as it (and in theory even at the same time as OS 9 in Classic!), and using a window manager with that can provide a more flexible, configurable look and feel.
Overall, OS X's shortcomings are few and minor, while its advances and capabilities are numerous and major. Never before have I seen a system this stable and usable with application support this good - and I have no reason to believe that I will see another one to equal it in the near future. I strongly recommend it, both for existing Mac users and for any PC users who're considering buying a new system and aren't sure Microsoft's new licensing scheme is in their best interests.
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