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Mac OS X has a long way to go, but it has been a long strange trip already. We’ve suffered
though Pink, Copland, and a few nameless false starts in-between. Now that the late night
Mac OS X release party hangover has faded, reality is creeping in. The Mac community has
had several weeks to observe Mac OS X in the cold light of day. And it is becoming clear
just how big of a job this transition will be.
In the days just before the official release, Apple held a low-key technical briefing for
the press, where Steve Jobs and several engineers spoke in plain language about Mac OS X.
It would be released when they said it would. It was good, but not finished. Mac OS X had
a long future ahead, and while they would like to see it received warmly, they made it
clear they were taking the long view. The spin was unmistakable: Mac OS X 10.0 was an
early adopter release, and problems were normal, not the fault of Apple mistakes.
The first impression Mac OS X makes is good, but it can be a little hard to appreciate
after the warm fuzzy glow of Aqua’s liquid interface cools down. Mac OS X's Finder is a
little slow, no matter how fast the hardware. Raw speed isn’t everything, but perceived
speed is. And while working with Mac OS X, I’ve found that while many operations are fast
enough, a small number of important tasks are surprisingly slow. Nothing is so slow that
it interferes with getting things done, but it leaves experienced Mac users wishing for
good old Mac OS 9. I suspect that there is a very large group of Mac fans waiting for the
system to be bundled before upgrading their present hardware. Of all the segments of the
Mac world, experienced users have the most to lose, and the gains remain hard to define.
Experienced Mac users are in a bind. The new OS makes everything they have learned at
least partially obsolete. Gone are the familiar troubleshooting tricks, hacks, and
workarounds that we have gotten to know and rely on. Now we cope with arcane command line
tweaks that, while easy enough to type, make the Mac feel a bit less like, well, a Mac.
New users won’t be in such a fret over these changes, as they do not know what they have
lost. And unix folks will evaluate Mac OS X on different standards compared to the
standards used by experienced Mac lovers to define Mac-ness.
Yet it is these very same experienced users that Mac needs the most in the next 18 months.
Developers are counting on them to upgrade all their applications to Carbonized versions,
which will deliver a healthy dose of revenue for beleaguered bottom lines. Apple is
counting on them to reposition Apple as the largest single unix supplier in the world,
with a large installed base of loyal users. Apple wants to grow the Mac market, and OS X
is their weapon of choice, but they need the momentum that only a large installed base can
deliver. Apple has managed large transitions before. The 68000 series to PowerPCs, MacOS 6
to MacOS 7, and 32-bit clean applications are a few examples. However, none of those
transitions forced such a significant change on users or developers as Mac OS X will.
Once the fog of learning the new operating system burns off, we should know if Mac OS X
looks as good in the morning as it did last night.
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"The Morning After"
