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Mac OS X Beta Reviewed On ArsTechnica
scout.finch writes: "John Siracusa has just written a review of the new Mac OS X Public Beta over on Ars Technica. His thorough and unflinching reviews of previous developer releases have been the most accurate source of information on Mac OS X thus far, and this installation is no exception."
Worst of the Unix and MacOS worlds put together.
.pdf.
:'( Menus draw incredibly slowly, ditto for switching applications.
I would tend to disagree. In fact, I think it's just the opposite.
The Unix side is stripped of most functionality. Unix people will be disappointed.
This baffles me. I'm a "unix person" (have been using Unix for about 6 years -- SunOS, Solaris, Linux), and I'm actually quite amazed with how well the Mac and Unix worlds mesh under Mac OS X.
Especially since there is no X server support and no development or daemon support (of the stock install).
For marketing/positioning reasons, it really doesn't make sense for Apple to include compilers and and X server with Mac OS X. They're not trying to be just another *nix distro.
The Mac side seems even more buggy and much slower.
No idea what this means. Classic is remarkably solid for me.
New MacOS look and feel is cumbersome, wastes too much screen space (definitely on a laptop, anyway). Not very customizable.
I'd admit there are some rough edges, but I honestly thinks it's quite a revolution (in a good way). If you're on an iBook, yes you're going to have problems since you're maxed out at 800x600. As far as "not very customizable," nothing could be further from the truth. Most UI elements seem to be made up of PDF files stored throughout the system. Do a search for
Old hat Mac users will have to relearn much of the interface
This was inevitable, and necessary, IMHO. I'm pretty darn tired of 1984-centric UI.
Very buggy. I couldn't copy files (except using 'cp' in a term) from a server to a local directory w/o weird errors happening. Friends reported system crashes/freezes (under Unix!?).
Something isn't normal. I'm running on a Blue G3/400. The install and setup went seamless, and in the two weeks I've been using MOSX for my day-to-day work, I have yet to see anything resembling a system crash. Classic dies from time to time, but that's not entirely suprising at this stage.
On the other hand, I've heard of people seeing kernel panics in the beta. Since the differences between my experience and others is so great, I suspect that certain hardware configurations are far more stable at this point than others (rather than just being general kernel problems). Especially since I've heard of people completely ignoring the stated minimum requirements, and then acting suprised when things don't work right.
Incredibly slow. Playing MP3's and browsing the web takes my 128MB iBook to it's limits.
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that things are still in progress. Note, for example, that there does not appear to be any support for 2D acceleration yet. This will slow things down substantially.
With 128MB of memory I found things quite usable (6-10 Classic/Carbon/Cocoa apps of varying sizes open), but not optimal. I added in another 128MB (256MB total) and the thing absolutely flies now. The OS boots faster, classic launches much faster faster, apps launch quicker, and the disk is rarely touched. I believe Apple is aiming to bring the minimum down to 64MB by the 1.0 release.
Also, you'd be suprised at how much faster the public beta is than DP4. I'm sure there are more optimizations to be done.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
This isn't a gripe, just an observation. I happen to use the Aqua theme myself, and the blue is getting old... :)
Be careful if you decide to install MacOS X on a Mac with LinuxPPC on it - I did NOT tell it to touch my partitions, but it did, causing the partitions to become inaccessible. I didn't try to find out what was wrong, just put Linux back and put X in the bottom of the drawer.
If you have another hard drive at all, that would be the safest place to try out MacOS X. I might install it again on a rainy day.
Applications (.app) are really folders. Drag and drop them in a shell to look inside them.
Cd to the Content/MacOS directory. There is the real application exectuable.
Then, if you have the developer tools (from darwin, for instance), you can look at executable content with 'nm'.
If you have things like:
0000f078 t -[MyClass _myMethod:]
then it is a Cocoa application.
You'll find that most of them are really cocoa applications.
The Desktop seems (to me) a poor rip of the NeXT Workspace Manager. It is real crappy, have many bugs, and is nowhere as usable as the program he tries to clone.
It is interesting to see that it is (almost) the only important Carbon app shipped with the system.
Long life to ObjC.
Cheers,
--fred
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I tried both Yellow Dog Linux and now receintly MacOS X Client on my iBook. Here's what I thought of MacOS X Client (compared to YDL):
:'( Menus draw incredibly slowly, ditto for switching applications.
:'( I hope the full release is much more improved than this 'beta'. MacOS X client needs more than just some polishing to make it practical and useful.
Pros:
- Supports sound (yeah!)
- Supports 32-bit color (yeah!)
- System config is easily at hand in the GUI (NIC settings, screen settings, etc.)
- Very simple. Install and go.
Cons:
- Worst of the Unix and MacOS worlds put together. The Unix side is stripped of most functionality. Unix people will be disappointed. Especially since there is no X server support and no development or daemon support (of the stock install). The Mac side seems even more buggy and much slower.
- New MacOS look and feel is cumbersome, wastes too much screen space (definitely on a laptop, anyway). Not very customizable. Old hat Mac users will have to relearn much of the interface, and Unix users will wish it wasn't so much in the way.
- Very buggy. I couldn't copy files (except using 'cp' in a term) from a server to a local directory w/o weird errors happening. Friends reported system crashes/freezes (under Unix!?).
- Incredibly slow. Playing MP3's and browsing the web takes my 128MB iBook to it's limits.
If LinuxPPC/YDL got sound support and better video support (I think both are in the works, or perhaps even done now?). Then it's a no brainer that YDL is faster, more stable, probably more secure, more functional, and cheaper than MacOS X Client. Stick a MacOS-X theme on YDL and you've got something cheaper and better than MacOS X Client.
Really, a sad day for me (being a long term Mac supporter) to see MacOS get this bad.
--Phil (with a big frowny face)
I've been running it for about 10 days now. It's basically BSD (Mach 3.0) with a Mac shell. It runs Mac OS 9 as an application and the major showstopper is that PPP can't be used (yet) with the older stuff. I leave a terminal window up at all times and switch between the two Mac OS shells and BSD on an as-needed basis. It makes the Windows NT 4.0 machine on the other desk look like a toy. (Of course, I've been a UNIX sysadmin.) Recommended.
OS X shows the most promise of any system out there. Ya, you can have *nix, but can your grandma use it? Or you can have Mac OS 9 (I taught it to my little brother who was seven and he had no problem with it) but it lacks features wanted by us slashdotters (like SMP or protected memory). It's two diffrent worlds almost, and OS X comes the closest to each that I have seen.
The OS X beta is very incomplete. There are many unoptimized areas, just try resizing a window and you'll see what I mean (or QT 4 in os x, or minimizing a window on a 233 G3, or running it on 96 MB of RAM, ect...). Hopefully the final release will run at warp 1 X 10^999999.
At the moment, the beta seems to be too intuative. This doesn't make sense at first, but how intuative was the apple menu? A small picture of an apple with great power and effecincy? Try explaining that to your grandma. The OS X GUI hasn't taken that extra step of complexety that appeals to the pro users, but can remain hidden to novice users. This would be like hiding the dock like I have on my iMac. I get the extra screen space back and the dock works fine, but it just isn't as intuative anymore.
Other options I think would improve OS X that would appeal to pro users would be to have a control strip in the unused upper right in the menu bar. To have an option for the file names permenently under the icons in the dock (no cursor rollover needed). The clickable area in the dock should extend to the base of the screen and not just the icon (easy to hit). Anchor the dock on the left of the base so commenly used apps would always be in the same place on the screen. And yes, I have sent them about 40 suggestions so far, including these
My $2 X 10^ -2
I've also been using it for almost two weeks. No reboots either.
There are lots of UI quibbles, which we all know that either Apple will fix, or third parties will. I'm not concerned about the loss of spring loaded folders or windowshades (actually, the Cocoa-ified Stickies HAS windowshades!).
I think the BIGGEST weakness of this OS will be Carbon. Carbon itself is a good thing, and was necessary, but it distracts ISV's from what they SHOULD be doing, and that's porting apps to Cocoa, and if they need to address the Solaris and NT market, use the portability stuff inherent in Cocoa (OPENSTEP). Instead, ISV's seem to be confused, running scared, and when we have apps that aren't Carbon OR Cocoa, we have to run the Classic environment, which is a huge waste of time. Classic boot times are slow, the necessity of running classic is a geek concept; normal users won't understand it. It's a memory hog, and many apps don't run at all, while many more run so damn slow it's not even funny. There are still several that run just fine. But the end result is so inconsistant as to be utterly baffling. I think Apple may have taken the only course they could, and how they did it was elegant as possible, but damn, I sure wonder how things would have worked out if Apple had evangelized Cocoa a LOT more strongly pushed the cross-platform features, and ease of programming, and not done the work on Carbon, and not made Classic so easy to fall back on. Personally, if I have any Classic apps I have to run, I'm going to dual-boot to get there, for a LONG while. Make a stronger case for Cocoa, and maybe more ISV's would have taken it seriously, instead of shunning it for either Carbon, or completely ignoring OS X altogether.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Despite that, I have not seen too many trolly articles here. The complaints I've seen have been reasonable, just as Ars Technica was a relatively reasonable review. People thinking about this OS should know about those faults. I've also seen some insiteful review of the Ars Technica article as well.
If anything Apple is getting a free ride here. People abuse MS all the time for things that Apple is doing. This is a "buggy" OS that takes up 800MB that hides important concepts from it's users. Some 200MB of that install are trailers for movies! Why should the install not tell you what a root account is? It's a simple but very important concept that's easy to relate. Granted, all of these things are better than what MS offers (920 MB install with very poor security and a checkbox to hide the entire contents of a hard drive, hides other things anyway, and costs much much more). Developments in free software are more interesting than this.
There is a little much coverage of this. Apple stuff has only tangential interest to most people who read this site. It's commodity hardware, and greater success will give us more toys to play with. Their use of BSD is interesting, and we hope that more gets ported back out as free. There seems to be more coverage of this than say Sun.
But really it would be much more impressive if some small company would develop something like this without all of the Apple restrictions. Imagine a small company putting togeter a nice Motorola computer ala IBM, so that duplication would be encouraged and profitable. Imagine also that they used all free ware, so that anyone could develop software for it. Further imagine that they had enough marketing muscle to get the thing noticed and it could be mass produced and cheap. If Apple would form a company to do this, and if they alowed this company to run it's existing codebase, we would indeed be impressed with Apple. As it is, shrug.
Poster does not hate Apple.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Let's back up some: The original Macintosh had one small bug that didn't become evident for a while - the name. It was simply 'Macintosh.'
When the newer version came out, the problem persisted. There was no way to tell a Mac with 128kB of RAM from one with 512kB. (they quickly became informally known as the 128K and the 512K, which was also called by it's code name, Fat Mac)
The third Mac, which had 512kB RAM but a new 800kB floppy drive (the original was 400kB... ah, memories) still didn't have a unique name, and ended up being known as the 512KE (E for Expanded, I guess... I have one at my parent's house ;)
Finally the Mac Plus came out, and sanity was restored. Every Mac since had a particular model name... Mac II, IIx, IIcx, SE, SE/30, IIvx (had one of those too... I'm a sucker) Quadra 700, 6100/66, 9500/132, etc.
But it's worth noting that Steve left Apple at around the time of the 512K - 512KE.
Now, a couple years ago the G3's came out. If they had continued with the ~8 year tradition of assigning each model a confusing number, the desktop would have been the 7700 and the minitower the 8700.
But Steve, who had returned, decided that they would simply be named 'Power Macintosh G3/xxx' where xxx was the speed of the CPU.
Okay, obviously a break from the numbering system (which did have a vague amount of logic behind it... I can follow up later on that if you want) but you could say G3 and people knew what you meant.
Unfortunately, the iMac (which also suffers from this problem) had come out and we all knew that the beige look that the first G3's had was not long for this world.
And indeed, the next models to come out of Cupertino in Jan '99 looked different. They had Blue and White cases. Here's a picture. Note, btw, that they ONLY came in Blue and White. By that time IIRC the iMacs came in colors. (more on that in a moment)
Apple, and everyone else, in order to distinguish them, came to call them 'Power Mac G3 (Blue and White)'s. So when he says that that's what he tested it on, that's important. I would have a good guess if he said G3/400, since the ones now known as Beige G3's weren't sold that fast, but the color tells me which MODEL.
The G4's have the same problem; G4 can mean the original G4 Yikes, with a PCI video card, or the slightly newer G4 Sawtooth with an AGP video card, or the Dual-Processor G4. Guess what people call these things in order to distinguish them?
iMacs are the
- iMac Revision A, the original 233MHz Bondi iMac
- iMac Revision B, almost exactly the same
- iMac Revision C, better known as 'Fruity iMacs' because they came in five colors.
- iMac Revision D, a somewhat faster version (ie Fruity/333 instead of Fruity/266)
- iMac Revision E, better known as 'Slot Loading iMacs' because of the new CD/DVD mechanism, or the 'Kihei iMacs' after the codename, or the 'Transparent iMacs' because of the redesigned case. This introduced the Graphite iMac DV/SE, and split the current iMac models up by how powerful they were (a low-end Blueberry, midrange in five colors, high end in Graphite)
- iMac Revision F, currently known as 'Summer 2000 iMacs', which come in different colors, and are currently shipping.
This makes it really frickin' hard to talk about iMacs and actually convey some sense of what you're talking about.The PowerBooks (which I don't really follow closely) are about as bad - they're presently being officially named after the color of the keyboards or something. And so everyone ignores that and uses the codenames instead.
Backing up, because Steve has boneheadedly decided that we shouldn't have a standard method of being able to tell these things apart (there aren't even name badges on the desktops - just a pictoral Apple logo) we have to describe the appearance, etc.
And as already noted, there never was a purple G3 desktop, though a lot of people did want one actually... Blue and purple have been the most popular colors.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Bash is the default shell, and it comes with vi - but not a terribly huge selection of other goodies. Apache is there, as well.
It's proven to be very stable, as the machine has been up for AGES:
bash-2.02$ uptime
5:45PM up 78 days, 4:16, 3 users, load averages: 2.55, 3.54, 3.63
As we all know Apple stocks took a beating, a severe one at that, couple of days back when it crashed more than 20 points because of its shortcoming in earnings for the 4th quarter. Analysts are hoping that Mac OS X would help Apple to earn its reputation of a survivor again
:)
In the past also Apple had been through severe beatings, but nothing like this. Wired has an article where they have mentioned that OS X might be the only straw it has. Remains to be seen..
Apple however priced the Cube for a price too high for anyone to afford, which made it inaccessible for both novice users and power users. At 1799 a piece it was too high for anyone with a sane mind to afford it, but for its elegance. And that was too silly a reason to fork out 1800 in cash, and it was reported that feature wise it really didnt make a difference from the G4 macs.
Hope apple would get its act together. It would be worth watching. As for me, I am just gonna go ahead and buy a couple of stocks
Rapid Nirvana
>"Why does this crap OS get so much coverage?"
This OS is very promising and I wish prejudice wouldn't come into play. If you check this thing out, I think you'd see why it gets so much coverage. Those who most hate Apple should be the most happy. They're actually changing.
The one that stands out the most, is that he wants a equalivent replacement for the Apple Menu. Why? The Apple menu is one of the WORST elements in MacOS. It is NOT obvious it's a menu, it is NOT obvious how to add things to it and quite frankly a clear majority of users (both Mac and Windows) I know just put alias' on their desktops. The entire GUI is point and click. It took me about 30 minutes to figure out it's quirks.
He also left out one of the most relevent piece of ease of use info about Mac OS X. Drag and Drop installation of Applications. No Applications can install into the system folder. How novel. Uncompress the file (if necissary) and drag it to the Applications folder. This is a BIG deduction in tech support costs since the OS is locked and root is hidden, no Extension conficts, no DLL hell.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Ars always seems to be slashdotted when I try to read one of Siracusa's magnum opi (opuses?). C'mon VA, donate them some big servers (and bandwidth!). But based on what I've read soo far... I think my next home PC's gonna be a Mac running OS X! My family gets the gui chrome, I get /usr ... marriage saved! ;)
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling