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OS X Won't Be Fully Functional On March 24th
mduell writes: "Just saw this over on MSNBC. It looks like Apple rushed OS X to meet the deadline, and that many key features (like DVD playing and burning) won't be functional when it ships on the 24th of this month. Also, there won't be a big splashy introduction, perhaps one in the summer when Puma (OS X 1.1) comes out." Which is not to say that Mac owners can't watch DVDs -- if they are dual-booting, at least. The article gets into a few other gripes as well, but none sounds earthshaking to me.
Got to the article too late to contribute, so I'll say it here.
The DVD license prevents Apple from making a DVD player to allows the DVD frames to be captured off the screen. Previous DVD players from Apple break things like `screen snapshot' to prevent this.
This makes a DVD player more complicated. Not only do you have to play a DVD, but you have to prevent a bunch of other unrelated features from working. Just the sort of cross functional integration that is difficult to perform during rapid development.
You can watch DVDs on Livid while running an Aqua Enlightenment theme although you will probably get sued six ways from Sunday.
this is absolutely right. i'm running MacOS X build 4k73 right now and there are very few bugs i've found (and those are cosmetic things, not kernel crashes). it's true that MacOS X is being released feature incomplete, but it's certainly not buggy.
really though, OS X as it stands now is considerably (like orders of magnitude) better than a Microsoft "final" release. sure DVD playback is missing, but really, that's a separate application. while it's very nice to have Apple ship their DVD player with their OS, it's hardly a core operating system issue. i miss some of the "important" features, like pop-up-folders, but the features that are "missing" from OS X hardly amount to anything.
at any rate, i think the hardcore Mac users will enjoy having a stable and reasonably efficient operating system on their Mac. it had to be released sometime, and if it's anything like the recent betas, it should definitely fill that void.
- j
Geez, you'd think someone at Apple had seen the css-auth/decss code floating around, wouldn't you?
[/tongue in cheek]
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
A. Dual-booting has always been an expected obligation until new versions of all the traditional Mac software are ported specifically OS X. Nobody but hack journalists are surprised. Most savvy Mac users consider this a real boon, as a kind of long-term protection measure for expensive software and years of skill investment. It eases the transition into the new Unix world.
B. As of the latest build, sleep functions on PowerBooks work perfectly, with two-second wake-up times. That's right: two seconds.
C. DVD playing is hardly a "key feature." DVD burning was *never* a key feature, nor was CD-RW. Until only recently this was always a third-party software opportunity.
D. That certain extra features will not be included is not a secret. Apple's been saying this for weeks: employees with real names and titles--not "sources"-- have been going on the record to point this out. Always interesting how much crappy information sounds like a real scoop if you conveniently can't dig up other places where Apple reps have gone on the record. Too easy just to accept the PR department's "no comment" without, say, reading stories on the exact same subject written elsewhere.
E. This article is a re-hash of an article that was on ZDNet and CNET last week. Notice the key bias words: inability, glitches, frustrate, annoying, frustrating, "not be able", "limit... usefulness", aggravation, lack. That's just in the headlines and first paragraph. Suspiciously like Linux reporting, eh?
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Shouldn't it be Mac OS X.I?
If it's true, then normally I'd be inclined to say that there is no such thing as "bad publicity", and minor complaints such as these might even make more average users aware of OS X.
But, because this is an Apple product, things are different. Lack of DVD support may not sound like a big deal to the few Linux users and hoards of Linux-wannabes on Slashdot, but to the Mac-crowd, it is a big fucking deal. The only thing they've ever had to be proud of is excellent multimedia, and Apple will take a lot of heat if OS X ships without DVD. This may also turn away a lot of Windows users who are thinking of trying it out... I know a Windows (and sometimes Unix) user at the office who is really psyched about getting a Titanium G4 Powerbook when OS X is released, but I'd bet money that if he hears OS X can't play DVDs, he'll put off buying it. (And why shouldn't he? The wide-screen DVD player functionality is one of the most-hyped cool things about the Titanium G4 Powerbook.) I'd also bet money that if he puts-off buying it, he'll end up losing the excitement and he'll never buy it.
Some of you also seem to think that very few Mac users are even interested in using OS X so soon. Not so. I know several Mac users, and knowing their clannish nature and love of "shiny things", they'll all want to be the first on their block to have the latest MacOS. Something missing as basic as DVD support will be a huge turn-off. They'll think, "Hey, I guess everyone was right about how archaic Unix is after all! Apple let us down and backed a shitty technology." Once the press hears that even die-hard Mac zombies are unimpressed, there will be even less Windows users interested in taking it for a spin.
If Apple is smart (and I'm not holding my breath), they will not release OS X until it's really done. DVD support can't wait for the first service pack.
Personally, I'm a Sun guy. (And my Blade 100 will be joining the LAN next week, baby!) But... OS X really had me hoping that the Holy Grail (Unix with a pretty face) had finally arrived. I'll admit it; the hardware is dead sexy, and if they had software to match, I'd order a G4 Cube tomorrow. I think it'd be a crying shame if Apple started following Microsoft's practice of releasing software that needs a year's worth of service packs to be usable.
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I like to watch.
SMP is not as important as you think, because there aren't very many multi-processor systems available right now. In fact, it's almost impossible to get one. By the summer, the machines will be more commonly available, and THEN it gets important as to what the OS does with it. At the moment with 9.1, SMP just isn't going to work. With OS X, it'll work, just not as well as they know they can make it.
The video support stuff is troll. I'm running OS X right now besides me on an original first-generation iBook. It has no fancy card, no fancy drivers, just straight out of the box Public Beta code. The interface runs just fine. I'm not using it to try and get 32645256 fps so it's just fine. Seeing as there probably won't be any real major game releases until later in the Spring/early Summer, the accelerated video is not as important as you think it is.
At the end of the day, Apple has seen the light (for they have found the Love of Unix). They have also made a realisation that MS hasn't - at the consumer level, all the gizmos and tweeks don't matter, because they aren't competeing with MS or Linux, or anybody else in that market. Jobs has already stated Apple's biggest competitor from here on in is Sony. Go figure. Plus, they're not going to do what MS did with various OS releases and pretend everything is fine only to let users and OEMs realise it isn't.
People are seeing this as them releasing an "unfinished" OS, but I really have to say - when was the last time you saw a finished OS? Would people get really upset if Linus turned around one day and said "OK, we're going to go to kernel 3.0 within the year and it's going to have 'X', 'Y' and 'Z' in it" and then a few weeks before launch he turns around and says "look, Z is a bit screwed right now, and we really want to get X and Y working properly first"? What if X and Y were going to completely redefine Linux, the computing market as a whole, and take everybody off into a new direction, and Z was support for a particular grpahics card?
All of this seems to me like overplaying the lack of some features that don't need to be there right now in a poor FUD campaign. Pity. Undermines the integrity of people like MSNBC (as if I ever believed they had any integrity).