Ars Technica OS X 10.1 Review

Joystickit writes: "John Siracusa over at Arstechnica has posted his review of OS X 10.1. He comes to the conclusion that 10.1 is much improved but still leaves much to be desired. It is an excellent read. He always seems to have the most in-depth reviews. Check it out." John's earlier OS X reviews are excellent as well; seeing what Apple does right and wrong is informative reading no matter what OS you prefer.

Comments

A step forward

[Grape Shasta]

Here is CNET's review, which gives a quicker summary of the bottom line. Probably the most important piece is the improved feature set for working on a Windows network, which will make the Mac much more friendly in a corporate MS-owned environment.

Good show BSD

[Zalgon 26 McGee]

Can we get over our parochial OS and license flame wars to say "Well done" to the BSD crowd?

OS X seems to be Unix done right...

[Tim_F]

It has a very good looking desktop. Yet behind that beauty it has the power of one of the most powerful operating systems in recent history. In the past it has been often immitated, but never equaled. Windows '95 was a direct rip of the current (at the time) version of MacOS. And yet it missed out on the important points. Sure I could put in a CD and it would autoplay it, but what if I wanted the contents of the disc that I had just inserted to be available to me at that instant from the desktop? On MacOS I wouldn't have to go through the the same old "My Computer->CD Rom Drive" nonsense.

Ease of use people. That's what it's all about. Apple has always had it, Microsoft keeps trying and missing, and Linux is getting there via comapnies like Mandrake and desktops like KDE.

Apple: Port OS X to the Intel platform. Microsoft is already running scared, now is the time to make them cower in fear.

Re:OS X seems to be Unix done right...

[NickV]

This is what I hate. People talking about things they have never used.

If I want to eject my music CD from the CDROM I should be able to press the button labeled EJECT and have it pop out, not have to drag it to the trash! - Ease of use people..

Have you ever used OS X? Oh... wait... no you haven't and I can tell that from that stupid mis-informed comment. OS X turns the trash can INTO an eject button when you highlight a CD or removable media device. It turns the trash can into a disconnect button when you highlight a network connection.

But seriously, ease of use is a matter of perception. On I MAC I find the concept of every app having each window as a floating MDI child without any real parent object frustrating! For example. If I have Mac IE open with 5 windows, to get to the 5th window (which is hidden behind quark) I have to click on the apple menu to activate IE, then minimise 4 windows before I can get to the 5th. On a PC, the 5th window is 1 click on the task bar away!

Bzzzz... please come again when you tried OS X and not OS 9. OS X does still carry on the floating MDI window paradigm, but when apps are minimized they are minimized as individual screens on the right side of the dock, and the "application icon" on the left side is a grouping of all the windows (ala KDE, and Win XP) where if you hold the mouse button over it, you can pick a window to bring forward or restore.

Oh, and the new iBook has an eject button too. Let's try to stop spreadin the FUD now shall we? I really like OSX, I really like *nix, and I think OSX is the best version of it out there. Anything that integrates the CLI to the degree that I can grep a highlighted set of icons and then have only the ones that pass the expression match still be highlighted is cool. Any OS that lets me use APT-GET is cool too :)

Re:OS X seems to be Unix done right...

[cpt kangarooski]

What, are you kidding?

Dragging disks to the trash to eject them is a _FEATURE_. I swear, I am not kidding. God's truth, it's a feature.

Now sit here beside the fire, my children, and receive the lore of early Mac disk management....

As a cost-savings measure, because Apple had (wisely) chosen to use the brand-new Sony 3.5" floppies with a whopping 400kB of capacity, the Mac had only one drive. (and this was a _big_ floppy for the time, in terms of storage space) Although users could have a second, or even a lot of external, daisy-chained FDDs, they couldn't be assumed to.

So there was a problem: how would a user use two floppies simultaneously? After all, 1) the noun-verb language of the GUI demands that there be a visible target for an icon to be moved. And anyway, 2) many users would want an OS disk, an application disk, and a data disk... maybe a lot.

The solution was this: the volume was slightly divorced from the media!

That is, if you want to copy 'Empty Folder' (because the original OS couldn't create new folders) from disk Fred to disk Barney, and Fred contains a copy of the OS to boot off, you'd do this:
1) Boot up from Fred.
2) Select Fred on the desktop, and use the Eject Disk command in the menu. This ejects the physical disk, but leaves a 'shadowed' copy of the volume on the desktop.
3) Insert Barney, which is then mounted on the desktop.
4) Drag 'Empty Folder' from the shadowed Fred volume to the fully active Barney disk.
5) The OS will at this point, autoeject Barney, leaving a shadowed copy of _its_ volume on the desktop, and ask for Fred to be inserted
6) Insert Fred, and the OS (which obviously couldn't've cached this) copies 'Empty Folder' to memory, then autoejects Fred, and asks for Barney to be inserted
7) Insert Barney, and the OS writes 'Empty Folder' to it, leaving a shadowed copy of Fred, still on the desktop.

Old-time Mac users will be familar with the infamous Disk Swap Tango.

However! What is of note here, is that the Eject Disk command literally ejects the disk, but does not unmount the volume. In order to dismount a volume, you use the entirely seperate Put Away command.

In fact, if you use Put Away on a volume that is active because the disk is physically inserted, the disk is ejected AND the volume is dismounted. Clearly, Put Away should have been a popular command.

Except that, ultimately, the developers making the damn thing found this cumbersome. Even thought the UI people (who are human, after all) were telling them that this was the best way to do it. So one programmer, following the Mac edicts of 'there's more than one way to do it' and 'direct manipulation is superior to abstract manipulation' (i.e. moving things with icons, clicking on close boxes, is better than using the menus to accomplish the same goals) made a shortcut whereby if you dragged an active or inactive disk/volume to the trash, it would be Put Away. (and of course, if the disk was present, ejected)

Although this was immediately picked up on by the HCI people as a bad idea -- because doesn't that imply that the disk is being erased? -- they found that it was, in practice, a damn lot more useful and easy to remember than the above confusion with the menus.

A few years later, of course, hard disks became commonplace, and the need for this behavior was mostly lost. Nowadays in fact, Eject Disk both dismounts _and_ ejects the disk, instead of only the latter.

So it was _never_ a kludge. It was in fact a really good shortcut that wound up becoming more common than the behavior that it was originally intended to be a power user's way of accomplishing! In fact, tests in the mid 90's indicated that changing the Trash into an Eject icon was disconcerting, and so never really pursued at the time, though it had been on the drawing board for ages.

It's not foolishness. Not in the least. I will agree, of course, that a physical eject button wired to the OS so that it is aware that a disk is dismounted is also a good idea. But given the needs in the early/mid 80's, the old behaviors made perfect sense.

PC World also has an OS X 10.1 review

[Black Acid]

You can read it here: PC Magazine reviews Mac OS X 10.1. However, Mac OS X 10.1 can cause problems if your hardware is not compatible.

Work-around for failure to startup from a FireWire drive Dik Gregory found that, after updating to Mac OS X 10.1, his external FireWire hard drive with Mac OS 9.1.1 installed, appeared in the Startup Disk System Preference. In Mac OS X 10.0.x, it did not. "However, selecting it had no effect. My system still booted from the OS X 10.1 system on my Cube's internal drive. To actually boot from the FireWire drive, I needed to first boot from 9.2.1 on my internal drive and then select the FireWire drive from the Startup Disk control panel."

There are some other problems with 10.1 but for the most part I'd say the upgrade is well worth it.

CNET also has a review of OS 10.1. There's some contraversy surrounding The "Free" OS X 10.1 Update that costs you $20. TechTV (formerlly ZDTV) also has a review of Mac OS X 10.1. I'd recommend anyone interested in Mac OS X 10.1 read all these reviews to get full coverage, and unbiased opinions.

Good to see...

[kerincosford]

...such an informed review of OS X finally.

Far too many reviews concentrate on the lack of Carbon apps for X. Of course this is a big deal, but it also shouldnt be any surprise - its a completely new OS. Besides, by next year, every major Mac application will be carbonized.

I recently started a new job and could choose between Windows, Linux and OS X. I thought, what the hell, I've never worked with Macs much, I wanna have a play with X, and if it sucks I can just slap Linux on there anyway.

After the first day of using it, I've never really thought about using anything other than X. Its a dream. As far as I'm concerned, its the best mix of Mac-style GUI, and a unix workhorse core. Who could ask for anything else?

Yeah, theres still some rough edges, things that should be there but arent, but theres also some damn nice stuff in there. I'd say I'm pretty neutral - I use Windows and Linux at home, and OS X at work with the occasional recourse to OS 9. I'm saving my pennies for a new 667MHz tiBook.

Os X is a Good Thing (tm). Bringing unix and open source to the masses. Stop pissing and moaning about what it lacks compared to Linux. OS X is nothing like Linux in user and market terms.

And, please, I implore, no one-button-mouse cracks.

Re:Good to see...

[foobar104]

Bye-bye, karma. I know this is off topic, but...

I'm saving my pennies for a new 667MHz tiBook.

I'd advise you to save about 150,000 of those pennies and buy an iBook instead. My best friend has a PowerBook G4, and I have an iBook, and while the big screen on the G4 is nice, we both agree that my iBook is a better laptop.

That nice titanium case on the G4 scratches and scuffs incredibly easily, and it gets very very hot. Not to mention the fact that the slight flex in the G4's case makes it all too likely for a spinning CD or DVD to grind against the inside of the drive; it happens to my friend about once every other day.

My iBook, on the other hand, is a dream. I'd consider it to be *almost* good enough for an only machine, and perfect for a second machine.

Oh, and another thing. (feeble attempt to get back on topic) My iBook and my friend's PBG4 feel just about the same under OS 10.1 with 384 MB of RAM each. Both very, very usable.

Understating the Advantages

[Rura Penthe]

While I respect John's reviews (and frequent ars), I think he understated the advantage of the speed boost in 10.1. Where my family's G3/450 desktop originally could not run OS X acceptably, as of 10.1 it has become the primary OS. RAM usage in classic has been massively improved (resulting in yet another overall performance boost), everything is quicker, and if you have a Dual 800 it will probably even slice your bread. ;)

here's a real world example of why OSX is amazing.

[heldlikesound]

On my 2001 iBook (with DVD drive) I am able to do the following (among other things of course):

1. Capture DV footage, edit it, and output it right back out onto a camera (or play it to a tv).

2. Run Apache, PHP4, and mySQL flawlessly together and then replicate my work onto my "real, live" server on the web.

3. Watch DVD's with no stuttering or slowdowns while working in the shell, editing code in BBEdit, listening to iTunes, and stress-testing the above Apache setup.

Make no mistake, OSX still has a way to go, but give it a year and it will be the propriatary OS to beat!!!!!

File Extensions are OK

[ducasi]

John Siracusa has written some wonderful reviews on each of the versions of Mac OS X, from early betas, right up to 10.1, and I have enjoyed reading them.
But I must disagree with him on his views about file extensions. He is almost right when he says that applications "MUST" use file types, but I would relax that to "should". It's still stronger than Apple's "may", but more realistic.
He should realise that there are too many places where file types and creators are lost to rely on them. For example, a pure java application can't do file types, or when you are file sharing using windows (smb) or Unix (NFS) servers, you're going to lose if you need to have file types in there.
The fact is that the rest of the world doesn't support Apple's innovations, and they can't fight this uphill battle any more.
Give it up John. File types and creator codes are one of the defining aspects of the Macintosh experience, until you try to share your work with other people.

Naming?

[Howie]

This has puzzled me for a little while... When OS X was first announced, I read it as the letter X, like Rally X. Apparently it's really pronounced "O S Ten", because that's what it is.

If that's so, then what's OS X 10.1? "O S Ten Ten Point One"? Surely it should be OS 10.1 (which is what it is) with no X, or OS X 1.1 or R2 or similar (if it's a whole 'different product')?

Re:Naming?

[hysterion]

OS XI if we're keeping with the theme

Just installed MySQL III.XXIII.XLIII (with MyODBC II.L.XXXIX-preIV) on it. Cool!

Installing standard Unix stuff

[bbum]

If you have the pleasure of using an OS X box and want to install any of a number of open source packages, I highly recommend that you check out fink.sourceforge.net.

Fink includes a set of package descriptions that patch a downloaded sourceball, configure and compile, install it into a custom directory, then debianize the binary...

...and, finally, installs the debian package.

There is also a binary version available.

i.e. you can:

'fink install gimp'

... and it installs gimp and all depdencies.

Heads up, Linux

[melquiades]

Sircusa's article is extraordinarily pedantic, which is not all bad -- he raises valid points, and we need to keep Apple on their toes. However, the big point sort of gets lost in the details: OS X is the magic combination of Usability and UNIX we've been wishing for all these years.

Linux developers, take notes. Most of what OS X is doing is not magic -- it's just a lot of steady, careful attention to usability. Honestly, how hard would it be to implement OS X's lovely Network Settings panel under Linux, for example? Yes, the OS X Finder is still a bit glitchy, but it's still way ahead of the various Linux file system browsers I've used. Yes, the Dock has its glitches, but it's a darn shot easier to use and configure than either Gnome or KDE's taskbars. Apple is hardly perfect, but they are extraordinarily good at the usability stuff, where Linux software generally is not.

That's a shame -- Linux can and should be just as gorgeous and usable as OS X, or any other OS on the planet.

Linux developers: get off the high horse, and lay off the one-button cracks. You have a lot to learn, and if you are earnest students of this new OS now, in five years you'll be teaching things to Apple.

Re:One problem...

[Have Blue]

As the other poster said, I have never seen files of the same type with the wrong type code.

"Hard-coding applications for documents": Not hardly. The separation of type and creator allows an app to own files, but it also allows apps to acquire files. An app that supports files of type JPEG can open all JPEG files regardless of creator. If you drag a JPEG file to it, it will open normally. If you drag that JPEG to a program that doesn't support JPEG, you can't open it, instead of opening it and getting garbage as happens in this review. If you double-click on the file, the app that created it launches. Best of all worlds.

Mac OS X seems to be UI done right

[2nd Post!]

For trash, when you select the CD-ROM or mounted drive or whatever... guess what happens? The Trashcan icon *changes*. It becomes an eject icon.

Other than that you can *also* press the eject button, the f-12 key, or Apple-E.

On a Mac, the fifth window is accessable by right-clicking on the IE icon in the Dock and selecting the fifth window.

Or, if you use a single button mouse, ctrl-clicking. Or keeping the button depressed until the contextual menu pops up.

Point being, I think the MacOS UI is better, not everywhere, but in most places.

Instead of 50 items in the task bar (5 windows per app, 10 apps), you have 10 icons in the Dock with context windows of 5 entries each.

Many windows

[melquiades]

For example. If I have Mac IE open with 5 windows, to get to the 5th window (which is hidden behind quark) I have to click on the apple menu to activate IE, then minimise 4 windows before I can get to the 5th. On a PC, the 5th window is 1 click on the task bar away!

Apparently you haven't used OS X much?

Right-click on IE in the dock (yes, I have a two-button mouse) and you get a list of all of its windows. You can choose one to bring it to the front. You can also hide or show all of them en masse.

I always found the windows taskbar irritating, because opening more windows clutters it up. I like having the windows grouped by app. I guess familiarity is king, and it's all a matter of individual taste -- although in this case, Microsoft agrees with Apple, since they're switching to a windows-grouped-by-app model in XP.

Re:here's a real world example of why OSX is amazi

[NickV]

In what way is that amazing to anyone but users of previous Mac OSes or win3.x?

In the same way that having a user connect a firewire DV camera into their computer and having it work without any configuration issues (yes, recompiling the Kernel for "Video-For-Linux" is a "configuration issue"), and then using an industrial strength GUI, and professional grade video editing software is amazing to Linux users. I mean, there barely is a viable DVD player available for Linux! (I know they're out there, but there isn't a feature complete one out there yet.) Also, I have yet to find USB support for Linux that rivals Apple's support.

Linux is great, but it's not the answer for everything. The funny thing is, OSX seems to be slowly becoming that.

Re:pay for bug fixes

[NutscrapeSucks]

Besides being ass-huge, one point that everyone misses is that 10.1 contains a DVD Player.

The DVD Forum license prohibits downloadable players. This issue generates flames on PC boards from time-to-time, so Apple isn't alone.

(and yes I realize that they could have packaged the DVD separately, but judging by the amount of flamage over the topic, it wouldn't have helped.)

Chinese Support

[Giant Robot]

It listed localization packs for Japanese, and other Euro langs..

Although there's no localization pack for the 'other' east asian language, does anyone know the status of chinese support under OS/X (ie, displaying, rendering fonts, input methods, unicode conversion etc...)?

Windows 2000 and Linux supports se asia l10n pretty well now, though w2k is really good! Everything is stored 'internally' as unicode, and the input/output can be converted to other (popular) encodings such as big5. Even the input methods are fairly complete.

I want to convert to mac for DTP stuff (but requires chinese typesetting for many clients). I tried searching for Chinese support (like truetype fonts, input methods) and the only thing I can find is old 3rd party software for Mac 7.x or something...

Ship delays

[JohnsonWax]

On a side not[e], was anyone else annoyed with the way Apple promised OS 10.1 is September, announced it on the 23rd, then waited until the last possible day of the month to actually ship it?

(you really have to dig having spell-checkers work inside of web browsers...)

Now, you have to keep in mind that in the closing days of finalizing OS X 10.1 at least some key Apple employees were caught well out of Cupertino when weekend getaways got dragged out to a week or more due to the airlines shutting down here in the USA. The ship date was on track to be closer to the 15th. Even Steve Jobs can't prevent the kinds of events that took place on 9/11.

New Apple topic icon(s)

[John Siracusa]

Man, it never fails...I always have moderator access to stories involving me. Anyway, now that I've forfeitted it, but while I still have a chance of being scored up, I'd like to pimp the Apple topic icons I emailed to Malda (where procmail no-doubt sent them to /dev/null :-P) The current one is just plain ugly, IMO. How about this instead? (Two versions of the same thing)

http://siracusa.home.mindspring.com/images/topic ap ple-1.gif

http://siracusa.home.mindspring.com/images/topic ap ple-2.gif

(Without the space...grrr)

Re:OSX Still needs work

[MSG]

When you make a shortcut in Windows, it's a bit like a soft link in Unix- it's only a pointer.

What? It's not *anything* like a soft link. It's not a filesystem pointer, it's a file. You can open it up and look at its contents. It's just a "special" file that the explorer knows how to read and interperet.

When doing backups of OS 10.x laptops from an NT-based backup system, I found that OS 10.x was sending the remote client (the backup agent) into a filesystem loop.

And you expected what? NT doesn't have any concept of a symbolic link, so there's no way to communicate to an NT machine that a file is one of those. There's just no language to describe it that NT will understand. Either symlinks work over SMB, and NT will follow them like any other file/folder, or they don't work at all, which would be very inconvenient, and very confusing to fix your special case of making backups from a platform too stupid to understand soft links.

Apple could learn a lesson or two from the Unix side of the market.

What lesson? Try the same thing on a Samba server running on Linux or FreeBSD. If you create an fs loop with symlinks, then your backup is going to fill up with your loop.

That's why we don't run backups on NT servers. Run your backups on a system capable of actually understanding the semantics of other machines, or run the backup from the machine with the content and pipe the data to the tape on the backup server.

It's NT that isn't a "good network citizen" and it always has been.

yet more user opinion

[motherhead]

Posting late on this topic but I had to add my two cents,

I have used macs to make money for about ten years now. So OS X development has been real important to me and yeah I was very disappointed with system OS 10.0.0 and even 10.0.4. I could not get any work done on it.

I could not use my Wacom tablets on my Ti PowerBook or my G4 Tower, hence I never booted into OS X. I have a nice scsi raid that I inherited after my friend sold his Avid system and that wouldn't mount. I hate the Apple Pro Keyboard, mushy nasty keys and I have a nice USB Aftermarket one. It wouldn't work. With my powerbook I would get kernal panics and lockups for some reason when I had my second 256MB chip installed (crucial, good stuff). And yeah, slow.

Since the Saturday I installed OS 10.1 I have yet to reboot back into System 9. Everything works and everything is fast enough for me. It might not be as snappy as 9.2.1 but hey I will take the protected kernel and the flat memory architecture since I have yet to crash 10.1 on accident (installing X gave me some weirdness but I expected it, this is not the same as apps blinking into the either because you did something silly like trying to access the file menu in order so save instead of just hitting apple-S)

Classic works much, much better then I would have thought considering the OS is running as an app and I have yet to see an emulator this side of MAME works as well.

Boot up OmniWeb and check out Slashdot to understand how nice the Quartz layer looks. Not only are the fonts beautiful but Slashdot gets a spellchecker since OmniWeb is hooked into the system library. IE 5.1... is a Microsoft product... If you like them, enjoy. Otherwise Mozilla and OmniWeb are all I need from browsers.

I have an external TDK VeloCD 16/10/40 FireWire and both the PowerBook and the Tower can burn disks from the finder with no problems whatsoever. Also, I keep hearing people saying that DVD playback is erratic. Heh, on my PowerBook DVD playback is fixed. It always sucked in 9.2.1 no matter which version I used of the player. Now it is flawless and I actually use it to watch movies now, this delighted me.

You know what sucks? This is what sucks. You can't tidy up the desktop as easily as you could with OS 7.x - 9.x. "arrange by name" is wonky and "clean up" only sometimes does. This is the desktop mind you, drive navigation is now actually fun. I also hate that the scroll wheel on my mice and trackballs work natively in OS 10.1, but don't under the classic environment, no matter if you load the drivers under classic or not.

The only thing I have not tried yet is Games, I have heard the OpenGL drivers are much improved and the tower came with a nVidia card so I should get around to it eventually. But if I do enjoy playing games on the Mac too damn much... well what am I going to use my Win2K box for?

I guess my point is this, I need my Mac to earn. So I can't have a broken OS, since installing OS10.1 I have gained much and lost nothing. That sounds like a successful release to me.

Apple's Technote on OS X 10.1

[etceteral]

okay.. karma trolling here, but I missed this link the first time I read through the article.

Here's Apple's Technote on OS X 10.1 chock full of useful tidbits about what bugs were fixed (lots of 'em).