Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem




The latter half of the 1990s was a dark time for the company then known as Apple Computer, Inc. Windows 95 had dashed any remaining hopes of mass-market desktop dominance for Apple. The big profits of the earlier part of the decade had given way to some huge annual losses. The future of the entire company was in doubt.

Like injured animals, corporations are adept at hiding the true magnitude of their injuries. As grim as things appeared from the outside, few Apple enthusiasts knew at the time just how close the company came to fiscal ruin. But the software picture was always crystal-clear—clear, and terrifying.

The Mac operating system lacked two important features essential to remaining competitive past the end of the decade: memory protection and preemptive multitasking. Over the course of many years, Apple made several abortive attempts to create a modern successor to the classic Mac operating system, all of which crashed and burned before the horrified eyes of Mac fans everywhere. Regardless of its financial issues, it was clear to the geeks that Apple was on the road to technological ruin.

Apple made its final play for salvation in 1997 when it purchased NeXT and, after one more false start, announced at WWDC 1998 what would be, blessedly, its last next-generation operating system strategy: Mac OS X.

By all rights, the Mac faithful should have been, if not ecstatic, then at the very least relieved at this turn of events. Finally, a modern operating system for the Mac. But there was another, equally common reaction: fear. As a body of code, Mac OS X was not an evolution or enhancement of the Mac operating system that we knew and loved. It was an entirely different—albeit not exactly new—operating system to which the Mac name and, presumably, user experience were to be retroactively applied.

Fear of just how badly this undertaking could turn out is a big part of what motivated me to not only learn as much as I could about the future of Mac OS, but also to write about it. As a freshly-minted Unix nerd, I couldn't help but be somewhat excited at the marriage of my two favorite operating systems. But laid over that optimism was a blanket of mild hysteria regarding every part of the project above the core OS.

Now here we are, a decade later, and Mac OS X has matured into a fine product. This ten-year marker presents an opportunity to do something technology writers usually avoid. I'm going to look back at some of my hopes and fears from the early days of Mac OS X's development and compare them to the reality of today. Was I right on the money, shrewdly warning of future disasters that did, in fact, come to pass? Or do my predictions now read more like the ravings of a gray-bearded lunatic? It's judgment day.

1999: Mac OS X DP2

The path to the Mac OS X project was littered with broken technological promises and missed ship dates. As it turns out, Apple was about to turn the corner and start actually hitting its dates and keeping its promises. But in 1999, I still had my doubts.


("Nailed it"…though predicting that a software product will be late isn't exactly a tough call.)

It wasn't really fair to make any sort of judgement about Mac OS X based on the second "developer preview" release, which Apple acknowledged upfront existed only to help developers begin their work and did not represent the final user interface. That's a good thing, because my evaluation of DP2 was not kind.

Actually using DP2 is akin to logging into a demented Xterm running a poorly designed window manager theme meant to look something like Mac OS. Launch a Cocoa application and you feel like you've been warped into NEXTSTEP, again running that funny window manager. Run a classic applications and it's like being in a slightly odd version of Mac OS 9, with that alternate NeXT universe still visible in the background. Pull up the command line and you start to think that all of this is one big facade running on top of good old Unix.

Given how far the final Mac OS X user interface diverged from the one in DP2, this harsh criticism hardly seems relevant. But none of us knew what 10.0 would look like back then. Something called Mac OS X Server 1.0 did exist as a shipping product in 1999, and it and looked a hell of a lot like Mac OS X DP2. It was not beyond the bounds of reason to imagine that the final Mac OS X user interface might be a cleaned up, refined version of this very same interface—and that would have been a bad thing.

Ever looking for the silver lining, I went on to opine that "I'd much rather be stuck using Mac OS X DP2 on a daily basis than Mac OS X Server. They both completely fail the 'Mac-like' litmus test, but DP2 is closer to that goal." Reading that now, it's clear to me just how desperate I was to find something good to say about the UI of this new OS.

The image below is a good distillation of my already slightly desperate attitude towards the Mac OS X user experience. Practically speaking, it compares the mouse movement allowed by Mac OS (green) when selecting an item from a sub-menu to the movement required by Mac OS X DP2 (orange). (Following the green path in DP2 caused the sub-menu to immediately disappear.)

This ain't no Mac OS
Attention Mac OS X DP2: you're doing it wrong.

The subtext was this: "Hey, NeXT guys. This is just one example of the kinds of things we Mac users appreciate—nay, expect—in an operating system that bears the Mac name. Slapping a Platinum coat of pixels on your existing NeXT code base is obviously not going to cut it. User interface design is not just what it looks like; design is how it works."

Internals intrigue

The technical underpinnings of Mac OS X were considerably more interesting. Even ten years ago, I couldn't help but dwell on the possibility of an x86 future.

The OpenStep APIs are cross platform. Mach is cross-platform. WebObjects is cross-platform. x86 builds of Rhapsody, Mac OS X Server, and Mac OS X inside Apple have been all but confirmed. Rumor has it that Apple routinely synchronizes all changes to Mac OS X across both PowerPC and x86 builds of the OS. Clearly, Apple's choice of where to deploy its new operating system is not limited by the technology. If they decided to try releasing a version Mac OS X for x86 processors, it would be technologically within their means.

Before you congratulate me for my amazing prescience, consider the next two sentences I wrote: "But will they do it? I seriously doubt it." If you'd asked me to place money on the question, I'd have bet heavily against Apple moving to x86. But I now realize I would have been betting with my heart, not my mind. My brain did get in the final word, however:

The cross-platform card is something to watch for. For the first time, the only thing keeping Apple off of the "PC" platform will be its business plan. And hey, with Steve Jobs calling the shots, anything is possible.

It's interesting to note that only two short years after his return to Apple, Jobs had already (re)cemented his reputation as a fearless and often unpredictable leader. Age had not slowed him down one bit.

File system metadata (which I was then calling "meta-information," for some reason) was also tickling my brain, though mostly in a positive way, believe it or not. I was intrigued by the concept of bundles, especially their use of this shiny new "XML" data format. But while storing metadata in separate flat files within bundles could work for applications, the future of plain file metadata was still in doubt.

How will Mac OS X identify the file type and creator of "regular" files? By file name extension, that concept so alien to traditional Mac OS? Or will HFS/HFS+-dependent type/creator meta-information soldier on into the future? Time will tell.

Note the blithe dismissal, the seemingly complete lack of concern. "Oh well, time will tell." Indeed it would.

Expand full story

139 Reader Comments

  1. FIRST POST! Smile

    Anyhow nice to see another of your articles on OS X.
    8814 posts | registered
  2. I doubt I'd be working for Ars all these years later if it wasn't for your first OS X review John, so here's a tip of the hat to you in public for it. Smile
    21602 posts | registered
  3. Thanks for the walk down memory lane, Mr Siracusa. As enjoyable as always.
    26 posts | registered
  4. Great stuff John, for 10 years your reviews have been one of my favorite parts of new OS X releases.

    As another follow-up, I'd be interested in your thoughts on how well Apple has done at avoiding Copland 2010:
    I agreed with this then and I still do. I'm amazed that Apple talks about how important it is to control iPhone app distribution to insure security and stability and then has us write apps for it with direct pointer access and without automatic memory management.
    1969 posts | registered
  5. Awesome, another great OS X article to bite into. I agree with Aurich, the original ones following the Developer Previews were one of the early things that drew me to Ars. Ah, the old black scheme...

    I'm not sure I agree with this, however.
    Originally posted by 3.1416:
    I agreed with this then and I still do.
    I don't think Copland was a lesson in not doing things half-way. In fact, I think the lesson, and the one that the general community seems to have drawn (along with, from that very example, WinFX) is that complete rewrites and rethinks are very, very dumb and usually don't work. It seems to me that most of Apple's current products, and DEFINITELY Mac OS X, are not the subject of huge monolith jobs but rather of rapid, rapid release and refinement. "Real developers ship" seems to be the absolute defining motto, with Apple preferring to get something with the core pieces out and then refine it quickly as issues crop up. That's not to say they don't delay some features and that certain core pieces (like APIs) don't get a lot of work before being made public (particularly APIs since once public they are very hard to ever change), and that's not to say that the "1.0 syndrome" doesn't bother a lot of people. But evolving existing code rather then "rethinking the whole widget" would certainly seem to be what has proven successful, by far, with anything short of very, very simple projects.
    7215 posts | registered
  6. Bonus points for whoever created the beast with the SBOD eyes!
    485 posts | registered
  7. Excellent as always, John!

    Though I believe innovative applications like Quicksilver and LaunchBar would've been created regardless of what kind of Apple menu shipped with Mac OS X(...)

    LaunchBar is older than that, LB 1 ran on NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and LB 2 on Rhapsody (you can find them Here).
    20 posts | registered
  8. On page 5, near the bottom, you say "here we are in 2009". Ought to update that Smile
    5413 posts | registered
  9. A very good summary.

    I've enjoyed these 10 years immensely. The DP4 review made me catch the bug and ever since then, Ars is near-as-make-no-difference my homepage.

    And, "old" black theme? Shucks.
    2283 posts | registered
  10. learned many from you guys, thanks john
    9 posts | registered
  11. B-?? Even as much as I would disagree over the years with some the important UI simplifications that you steadfastly refused to accept (like the Dock, banishment of the fiddly Apple menu, and the admittedly muddled trade-off of true-blue spatial behavior for file browsing in the seemingly endless Finder follies) your reviews have always been wonderfully argued, deliciously written, incredibly enlightening, and brilliantly put together. A- for you too.

    My only question/demand: as Mac OS X fades into Apple's sunset (at least for the company's mainstream audience), any hope for iPhone OS reviews of similar obsessive depth and quality...?
    14391 posts | registered
  12. quote:
    Originally posted by xwred1:

    Oops, yeah. (The article was actually written in 2009.) Fixed now.
    3786 posts | registered
  13. quote:
    ... but the sacrifice of spatial consistency was foolish and needless. A Finder that does not leverage such important aspects of human perception can never reach its full potential.

    6 posts | registered
  14. A nice reflective, how far everything has come.
    Stability, blessedly, had never really been an issue; all of the developer previews of Mac OS X exhibited better OS stability that any release build of classic Mac OS. Very early Mac OS X builds had plenty of application stability issues, but those disappeared at a steady pace leading up to the beta.

    Performance, on the other hand, had been a thorn in Mac OS X's side ever since Aqua first appeared on the scene.
    Mac OS X is slower than Mac OS 9 on the same hardware. The interface is less responsive overall. All classic applications take a minor speed hit. RAM usage is considerable due to the "double-OS" nature of the Classic environment. Despite a superior VM system, OS X can and does get into trouble when the paging activity starts to build on systems with close to the minimum-required 128MB RAM.
    The performance issue was definitely interesting from the beginning. When I upgraded from the Public Beta to 10.0, I had it on a 400 MHz G3, though with significantly more RAM then the 128 "minimum" (and in the future we'd know one of the best things to do with Mac OS X was give it lots of RAM). It was certainly a significant step backwards in terms of overall responsiveness, straight up performance, polish, etc. While I hadn't been using Macs as long as you had, with the SE being my first, I'd still been on them for a long time. Yet nevertheless, I ended up switching to 10.0 as my main workstation for most of the time. The reason was that, while absolute performance wasn't on par, the multitasking upgrade enabled that to be disguised in a way that was never possible on Classic, and in turn meant that the relative performance, what actually mattered, was often at least as good. I think how well individual Mac users felt about early versions of Mac OS X likely had a great deal to do with how well they good transition their mental models to a true multitasking system. For example, it might have taken, say, 4 times longer to launch an application in 10.0 then 9.2.1. However, in 10.0 it was possible to first launch the web browser, open the morning news sites, or documentation that needed to be read, or whatever, the simultaneously launch all the other applications in the background, and leave them running all the time, then switch back to the browser to read (or text viewer, or whatever). Even though the applications would take much longer to launch, and even though other tasks were issues, the actual time delay that mattered was effectively zero, because none of my time was lost waiting for them (as I could do other stuff). In the end, the overall system stability, the multitasking, and the access to a vast and growing library of Unix applications, made me switch over fast despite hating much of the GUI. It's hard to remember how big a change it was to abandon extension hell and cooperative multitasking.
    This is where I stand with the Mac OS X Finder. Though popular outrage in response to the abandonment of spatial consistency in the Finder never materialized, I remain firm in my conviction that a Mac OS X Finder that retained all the advantages of its predecessor would have a much better shot at greatness.
    Trumping even the schizophrenic Finder, the inability to rename files without worrying about breaking something (and the too-clever subterfuge that makes this appear to be possible) is the most glaringly un-Mac-like aspects of Mac OS X.
    Agreed 100% here, on both. Here too may be an issue where it's just getting harder and harder to find anyone who remembers differently, who remembers how good a real actual spatial system can be. For me, this stuff has just become a source of sad resignation. I don't have any real hope of it getting fixed anymore, and can live with it, but it's disappointing to imagine sometimes what could have been.

    If I had to sum up my biggest issue with post-Jobs Apple in a few words, and perhaps this would work with John Siracusa's experience too, it'd be: consistency and dependability of interface. All over there are many cases where Apple has been lazy about making things consistent, or about having applications remember the little details of their operation. Basically, failing to maintain a coherent state, particularly between runs (ie., for a long time Safari wouldn't even remember sessions, and even today it's session memory is horribly fragile). It is interesting how little a system needs to be unreliable, and to forget state (like window placement, sizing, etc) before the mental model breaks down and people have to switch to other management methods.
    Obviously, I still think Mac OS X has plenty of room for improvement.
    Yep. To toss out a single major technical area I hope to see Apple make Mac OS X lead on, data integrity would be on my wish list for, well, for 2008, but I'd take sometime in the next few years. That they've started trying to make back up far more accessible for everyone with Time Machine might be a sign they recognize this, but I think Apple is uniquely positioned to do interesting and important things there. Dumping ZFS was a big step back, but that was as much forced by politics and business stuff as anything, so I hope they have their own project cooking, waiting to amaze us all.
    7215 posts | registered
  15. quote:
    Originally posted by lookmark:

    Not from me, but there have been some very detailed iPhone OS reviews at Ars in the past.
    3786 posts | registered
  16. Thanks John for explaining why the original Mac OS Finder was so great. It must be frustrating to be so right about something and have so few people get it! I like your new explanation of why the Desktop now serves the role of being the known place that one can always find.

    The Desktop also wins because you can easily get to it from any file-open dialog. This is especially important because Mac OS X has so many different file dialogs -- Carbon, Cocoa, Java. File dialogs could also really use improvement and consistency.

    BTW is anyone else confused by Windows 7 file dialogs? I cannot figure them out. Even the Desktop is hard to find now.
    3 posts | registered
  17. Excellent article. I've been working with Apple products since 1983, and spent a lot of the intervening years in the Apple Authorized Education Sales Consultant program. You remind me of the time I really thought if we all wished (complained) hard enough, Apple would listen - especially on the Finder metadata and spatial finder issues.

    But you know, the newer Apple employees and enthusiasts don't seem to see the problem - that was then, this is now. Even for myself, I've gotten used to the changes, so they (mostly) don't cause me to grit my teeth when I boot up. How sad is that?
    674 posts | registered
  18. Excellent article. Over the past decade, I remember reading several of your previous OS X reviews/rants, and I almost always agreed with them. And your take on metadata is spot-on, too. Every few weeks I see someone deal with having to add a file extension to an old file (I mean really old) that was stored on a corporate fileserver (Windows or *nix) and hence lost it's old filetype/creator code information. Since they're non-technical people, they have no understanding of why this happened or why they have to do it -- they just curse the "dumb machine" that doesn't remember what application originally created the file.
    73 posts | registered
  19. Haven't even read the article but I have to take a moment to congratulate someone for the artwork that goes with it. I'm pretty sure I've seen the Morlock art before, but not with spinning wheels of death.

    12459 posts | registered
  20. thanks for another great article!
    146 posts | registered
  21. I think on a larger scale, aapl's OSX is a modern marvel of software engineering. For all that the first releases were more like beta releases, I gained a new appreciation for performance when Vista was released. How was it that OSX had such solid performance on inferior hardware all these years? Well, MS is no slouch and I'm sure 7 is great, but there are definite advantages to having a competent, visionary dictator running projects rather than a classic bureaucratic corporation run by committee. And given MS's flailing in the new worlds of consoles, internet and mobile hardware (none of which are technically beyond their reach) the point is really driven home. He might not be a good person, but he's a fantastic CEO. Betting on Steve is smart. Here's to the crazy ones that brought him back more than a decade ago. And to Bill Gates, for lending a helping hand ;-)
    4947 posts | registered
  22. Great read.

    I find myself dumping stuff my desktop constantly for the very reasons you outline in your article: it's one of the few ways I can consistently access them spatially.
    7482 posts | registered
  23. I hope you'll be giving us a thorough gutting of the iSlate OS when it materializes, John.

    We can't allow a new tendril of Mac OS X to escape unprobed in its dusky corners.
    2044 posts | registered
  24. Fun read. I had switched from the Mac to a PC running a win2k release candidate back in 1999. I remember reading these articles feeling quite vindicated in my decision to switch -- it seemed to me at the time that Apple was still doomed. It's amazing how much progress Apple made since then. My household now has 5 macs and no PCs.

    (I do agree that the Finder could still use improvements, though)
    1070 posts | registered
  25. it is hard to remember how slow things were back in the G3/10.0 era- so slow I stayed with OS 9 for actual work (as opposed to playing around) until the G4/10.2 combination (even then Illustrator was painfully sloooooow)..... as noted some of the choices presumed that eventually the hardware would bring "teh snappy" which the current MacPro/MBP do: routinely use 1 GB Illustrator files-- and eventually snappy will come to the iPhone/iSlate (and still have a trusty Pismo that runs 10.4.x, but it choked on 10.1, but don't actually use it)

    OS X didn't graduate from elementary school until the Intel transition and the apps were universal- it still has a long way to go
    1213 posts | registered
  26. I remember reading those OS X DP reviews (and the beta and 10.0 release reviews) in high school. Have 10 years really gone by? Thanks for all of the great articles, and I look forward to your next one!
    726 posts | registered
  27. I was a committed Mac user back in the dying days of OS9, and probably would have remained one going through OSX, except for the fact that for business reasons it was necessary to acquire a machine to run XP. All my friends were shaking their heads and talking about build quality and ease of use and how much better PPC was. I bought a mail order x86 machine with XP preinstalled. It was amazing, given the hype about Apple. It was super fast compared to the Macs, the OS was easy to use and much more stable and functional. There was a huge amount of memory, and a huge disk. Build quality seemed to be far better than the Macs of the day. It was cheap.

    The Apple stuff had all been massive hype with nothing behind it. After a couple of weeks using the new machine, I knew I would never believe anything said by or about Apple again until I'd verified it for myself. Just about everything I had been told and had accepted was wrong. Later on I put Linux on the new machine, Mandriva in fact, reasoning that if I were going to have a userland shell over Unix, it might as well be Linux on perfectly decent hardware one already had, rather than buy a whole new set of very expensive hardware just so as to run another Unix variant.

    I never went back, though now its the other way around, its useful to be able to help people with their OSX installations, so I do sometimes use it. But as a preferred personal tool, no. The gap between hype and performance, once seen, had just been too great, and it turned me off Apple and its hype for ever.

    Nice article, though.
    post | registered
  28. Great article once again John. I owe you a lot, when the development of OS X was announced I had not used a Macintosh for several years, my only Apple product was a "fat Mac" bought at auction for $400 and given to my 3 year old daughter as a plaything 10 years prior.

    I was going through a revulsion in using Windows for many years and had had it with R&Rs (Reformat and Reloads) I had wasted many hours on with Windows, I was hungering for something better, and largely through reading your reviews I felt that Apple was going to really take off when OS X came out. So much so that I used some "found money" (in six figures) to bet the farm on AAPL stock. I owned thousands of shares in Apple before I even owned a "modern" Mac. I eventually bought a G4 Cube to run the beta version of OS X when it became available.

    It's taken some time, but has turned out really well for me (obviously). You were very instrumental in this with your articles.

    2054 posts | registered
  29. Great retrospective, John. I also give you an A-.

    Every now and again, I wonder that Apple might pull spatial consistency, metadata, et al. out of the hat in an OS release and people will laud how these "new" innovations make so much sense and how difficult computers were to use before...

    Looking forward to more of your reviews, and eventual UI vindication. Smile
    157 posts | registered
  30. I've thoroughly enjoyed your OS X articles over the years, but it amazes me how you old-school Mac users are able to take such a blind eye to all of the many, many problems that invisible creator codes and type codes present.

    It is so easy to understand why Apple deprecated the Creator Code. I don't understand why it took them so long to disable it completely, or why some people (who should know better) seemed so surprised when the Creator Code was finally removed from the OS.

    Let's imagine a world in which Apple did *not* deprecate the Creator Code in OS X nine years ago:

    You download a .zip file. You've configured your system to use a fancy new unarchiver for all zip files, but because of an invisible, un-editable Creator Code associated with that file, it opens in fucking Stuffit Expander.

    Inside that .zip file is a .txt file. You've configure Emacs as your preferred text editor, but because of an invisible, un-editable Creator Code it opens in TextEdit.

    Inside that .zip file is also an .html file. You prefer Google Chrome, but because of an invisible Creator Code it opens in Opera.

    Ok, forget about downloaded files. What about files you've created yourself? I'm a programmer and I've experimented with many different text editors over the years. When I switch to a new text editor, Finder makes it easy to change which text editor I use for my source code files, except that some of the software I used inadvertently set an invisible, un-editable creator code on my source files, overriding my current preferred choice of text editor.

    When I open a folder with some old source code I know which text editor I want to use *today*, but I really have no idea what text editor I used to write those files originally, or whether those files have creator codes or not. It is a huge problem. (and if I use Finder to manually override the creator codes on those files, that won't help me the next time I switch editors).

    This continued to a be a huge annoyance up until Snow Leopard, which finally disabled those nasty creator codes once and for all. Creator Codes have no business on a modern OS. Apple's replacement for the creator code, which puts the decision *solely* in the hands of Finder and the user rather than the creating application, is obviously superior.

    How about those invisible, un-editable type codes? What we have learned of the last 30 years of personal computing is that average people are able to understand file types like .jpg, .png, .gif, .txt, .html, .doc, .xls, .zip, etc. There's no need to completely hide it from them; when I get on Windows the first thing I do is disable file extension hiding in Explorer.

    The OS X Finder again takes the ideal approach: it gives the user the power to show or hide the file type on a per-file basis, while maintaining interoperability with every other computer on the internet. What's wrong with that?
    93 posts | registered
  31. The fact that the Finder is still so user-unfriendly after all these years boggles my mind. OS X has made amazing progress, and the engineering behind it is astounding, but it I still can't believe that one of the most used apps is still so unpolished. It frustrates me nearly every time I use it.

    Overall, I can't help but feel like it's worse than both the spatial Finder of OS9 and worse than the single-view Windows Explorer circa Windows 2000. There are good substitutes out there (hooray, Path Finder and Quicksilver), but it does gall me that I have to pay $40 (Path Finder) for something that, realistically, should be built into the operating system. It doesn't even have to replace the Finder - just call it File Browser, and put it inside the Utilities folder.
    961 posts | registered
  32. quote:

    You are making a lot of assumptions about what "average" is. As easily as you say that people naturally understand extensions, I can say that my parents and my non-techie friends don't. They prefer to open files in the application that created them, if at all possible. That's because "average" people naturally associate a file with a program rather than an abstract format. In fact, I would go do far as to day that these folks prefer the default application as prescribed by the creator code because it is the "right" program for the file. They don't want to have to make a decision about what program to use. They don't care about seeing file extensions at all, they don't know what most of them stand for anyway, and they are not going to remember them.

    This comment was edited by tenuki on January 12, 2010 18:24
    320 posts | registered
  33. I remember buying a retail copy of OS X 10.0 for no real reason at all. I just wanted to try it out and my only mac at the time was an old iMac at 266 mhz (I think) and 256 megs of ram.

    It did lead me to discovering this site as after I installed it I realized I made a mistake because it ran like shit. So when I looked up OS X and performance your article's popped up and I got to reading. I was pretty fascinated with all the little details.

    Now I don't really have a reason to use Macs but I still like to read about them.
    1209 posts | registered
  34. Thanks for coalescing your reviews here, John, and for making it accessible to non-subscribers. I still loving going back to many of the older reviews from time to time; particularly the DP2 and 3 reviews.

    It might be true that during the transition to Aqua, much of what made a Mac, "a Mac" was notably missing. That being said, I still remember booting my first Mac OS X-capable machine -- a 500MHz iMac G3 with 10.1 -- and having it recapture all the imagination, fascination, and awe I felt when I booted my first Macintosh (a Performa 575 with System 7.5).

    The fluidity of the UI, the ethereal transparency, the Dock magnification really captured my imagination. Now, granted, I'm so used to it by now, and it really wasn't great for productivity, but I think they really scored big with first impressions. It really was like they redefined the Mac all over again.

    And, to be honest, I think that's what Aqua was all about: winning first impressions at a time when it was critical to win the hearts and minds of the established base. Apple seemed, to me, to be trying to say, "This is different. Markedly different. You may hate what it's missing, but here is where we're going. We think you'll enjoy the ride."

    That said, I do agree with much of what you say, though I'm still not sure what I want from the Finder. It does some things mildly well, and others just seem to fall by the wayside; I do think they've been getting away from the "multiple personality thing" you've mentioned in previous reviews, despite having two distinct methods of viewing.
    797 posts | registered
  35. This is a strange trip down a bad memory lane for me.

    I went through it on the Mac ... and I jumped ship ... went to Linux, which still has it's pains I surely do admit.

    But the Mac OSX "experience" was too painful to continue, particularly at the price. The problem for me was the incredible continual churn of everything ... the apps, development, hardware, upgrades ... you name it. Nothing you wanted to depend on for any length of time was dependable. Everything was whim-of-steve and gone tomorrow.

    It sure didn't help that Apple shifted to an "EDWIM" marketing/customer strategy ... "pro" users were simply not what the platform was about anymore ... it was all about your iPod and then your iPhone and content consumption ... iTunes etc.

    It also didn't help that Apple decided that the "Chin" iMac was all the computer anybody could ever want unless they truly wanted an Octo-core monster at a beyond octo-core price.

    Time to bail... glad I did. Linux (Fedora in my case) is just so much less headache than trying to live with the churn.

    In your review of things Apple/OsX ... here are a few "by roads" of that history you don't mention which I think are worth mentioning:

    * remember the old "pros get altivec, cons(umers) get G3" completely artificial marketecture that Apple played for years? Remember the other piece of it which was "cons get squinchy little AIOs ... no other choice?" Time, technology, and display prices eventually killed off most of this ... but the eMac was a singular Mac ... the living refutation of Steve. It had a 17" monitor they'd told education for years that education couldn't have. It wasn't the sunflower (aka 'iBoob,' titMac) that Steve said that education would buy ... and they wouldn't. And it had G4+ (altivec ... why? Because the OsX transparency compositing depended on in in those days (before GPUs could do a lot of it with 'textures') and osX ran like ass on anything without altivec.

    * obj-C and Cocoa ... nice idea, for nextstep... very bad idea as the underpinnings of a true general purpose OS. And OS should be language-agnostic ... duh. Languages come and go. objC + Cocoa as a system API is really a bad idea ... and it will never be a good one.

    * you don't discuss the OsX performance wars, the "micro-kernel" battles ... the difficulty scaling MP etc.

    OSX "was a success" because the Mac lives on. But IMHO, the Mac is becoming ever less relevant, and Apple is an entertainment and widget company now. Steve did "milk it and move on to the next thing" and his ships came in.

    Computers in general are "less relevant" now except that they do all the jobs they used to do and a few more ... we expect them to be good working tools these days. The glitz is gone for anybody who actually really uses a computer. You need to be some really weirdo "performance weenie" to get into a lather about "performance" on a PC these days... and so much of that "performance" is just swallowed in glitz and bad codec implementations ... and the world wide wait.
    13991 posts | registered
  36. quote:

    Nice post.
    post | registered
  37. quote:
    Originally posted by BadAndy:

    To be fair, most people "really use" computers for email, web browsing, text editing, and maybe some casual gaming. In fact, I daresay (by number) that's the overwhelming majority of computer users. To that end, computers damn well should be "good working tools", not much more of a hassle to use than a car. As far as I know or remember (used Macs since System 6), Apple never catered or really even cared much about these people who "really use" a computer.
    1373 posts | registered
  38. John, whenever I run into a problem in OSX, an inconsistency in the UI or the never-ending frustrations with the Finder or idiocy of file extensions I think of your reviews.

    Quite simply I could never understand some of the design decisions in OSX... and still can't.
    164 posts | registered
  39. Congrats, John!
    I did read all those articles when they came out! Great!

    "Obviously, I still think Mac OS X has plenty of room for improvement."

    Can you share your wisdom of your desired advances?

    And one little question: When did you/anybody first posted the "FTFF concept"?
    59 posts | registered

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