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."

Comments

A warning about MacOS X and LinuxPPC

[Bilestoad]

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.

Re:A warning about MacOS X and LinuxPPC

[Auckerman]

MacOS X installs a boot partition. If you had used Apples partition utility and made MacOS X PB the first partition on the harddrive, just as the instructions say, this would not have happened. Before you act surprised you should read the documentation.

Re:Well...

[jafac]

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.

Re:testing environment

[cpt kangarooski]

You're not a Mac person, or you wouldn't have said this.

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.

Apple should have...

[jaysones]

released this OS under a different company name. If everyone thought this was some startup company who had taken FreeBSD, put a stunning interface on it, made it very easy to use, while retaining all of the cool BSD stuff, then we'd hail them as Gods. Instead (and I'm not trying to bait), we have people who read the first 5 letters of the article (A-p-p-l-e) and respond with

>"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.

Well...

[Auckerman]

I've been using OS X PB as a desktop OS for almost two weeks now (no reboots, no shutdowns since install). I think his UI concerns are little more than personal taste, and not as objective as he would make it out to be.

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.