Reprieve for Booting New Macs With Mac OS?

MatthewRothenberg writes "Apple has announced that as of January, new Macs will boot with Mac OS X only, but now MacInTouch reports that there might be a reprieve in the works for booting with Mac OS. According to one reader, a Quark representative has been calling pro publishers to ease their worries about the lack of a Mac OS X-native version of its QuarkXPress DTP program; after talking it over with Quark, Apple has agreed to move back the Mac OS X-only deadline until June." I can imagine that conversation with Jobs: "Why don't you just finish porting your freaking product already?"

Comments

Well Sometimes Portings isnt so easy and quick.

[jellomizer]

I bet the program was filled with a bunch of coding tricks that made Classic Work Fine but those tricks no longer work in OS X. Although a lot of the framwork may be simular the reality of coding is sometimes inorder to get it to work the way you want you will need to do some tricks that makes porting harder. It is my guess the code it well hacked up and they are running into a lot of stumbling blocks in order to get it to work.

Re:Well Sometimes Portings isnt so easy and quick.

[cpeterso]

Just how difficult is it to port a Mac OS 9 app to Mac OS X's Carbon APIs? It's not that hard. Carbon apps are native Mac OS X apps and still binary compatible with Mac OS 9.

If Quark had not wasted YEARS rewriting Xpress from scratch (ala Mozilla), then Adobe InDesign would not have made the inroads it has (ala IE). Imagine a world a few years ago where designers had to choose between upgrading their huge library existing Quark files to a Quark XPress 5.1 Carbon app for Mac OS X or starting over with the incompatible, untested Adobe InDesign 1.0? Adobe wouldn't have had a chance..

Joel on Software: "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"

Re:Well Sometimes Portings isnt so easy and quick.

[WatertonMan]

While in theory it isn't that hard, in practice it can be. I've noticed that, oddly, the place where most have problems is in using proper Carbon events. Yet that is probably the #1 facet of the program that will affect performance and perceived fluidity of use.

I honestly don't think that most people would complain too much if a program was fairly good but didn't use all the features of the OS. I mean most people were happy with Quark that barely used any OS7 feature.

The big question really is how good Quark will be. After all the disparaging comments by the Quark head, I'm none to optimistic that they'll do that good a job. This is an excellent way for Adobe to gain market share.

This bothers me, as a Mac supporter

[MacAndrew]

For many many years Apple bent over backwards to allow legacy software to continue to work, through the transition to 32-bit addressing to PPC and so on. That has started to break down in recent years, and while I can appreciate the benefits of things like abandoning the 68K machines with new OS's (speed, for example), and now, to a lesser extent, booting into OS 9, I'm worried Apple may get a little too used to it, as Microsoft long has been. These moves are a great tool to force people to upgrade ... and Macs users reasonably get pissed over being forced to upgrade -- hardware or OS or apps. The easy path of abandoning compatibility makes more money for Apple, but sacrifices an element of the OS that many of use consider really, really important.

I adopted OS X well, but was still have uses for OS 9, as on our iMac. The OS X was a novel transition for me, as a 15-year Mac user, because for the first time I had to upgrade several apps to work under the new OS (Classic Mode is not a panacea!). When Apple starts to disconnect from the legacy machines, the software publishers will also do so, if only because maintaining different versions for different machines is too onerous. But many of us have funky old programs that will never ever be updated because their authors have moved on, or the upgrades offer nothing we want to pay for -- we just want to continue on as we have. That won't be possible for long, esp. if the hardware path abandons our antiquated (read: 3 year-old) ways.

Concretely, I first heard about this from the IT guy at my kids elementary school, which has a substantial flotilla of iMacs. He said it was going to be a pain for them, and with PC forces already snipping at the Macs -- the school admin and high school computers are PC's -- this could portend bad stuff for Mac land. It is a fact of life that the schools buy buy new machines to replace broken ones or expand, and if that necessary path is suddenly encumbered by new transitions and expenses, well, some places will decide it is an opportune time to homogenize the fleet.

Just some musings ... I've felt that Microsoft has manipulated its profits and bug-fix burden for years by telling users to "get an upgrade" ... Apple may drift in that direction to its long-term detriment ... and yes, before anyone leaps forward, this is an obvious chip in favor of the free software movement. I'm just heavily invested in the older ways; yet (Steve? Are you listening?) I certainly don't rule out moving on. We're not at that crossroads, but I don't like the signals I glimpse ahead (hey, I maintained a metaphor.

Re:This bothers me, as a Mac supporter

[Melantha_Bacchae]

In order for Apple to survive and compete with its minority marketshare, Apple has to be different and better than its competitors. Apple has to be able to improve, they can't keep offering the same thing for 15 years.

OS 9, despite all the amazing things Apple was able to get it to do, was still Windows 3.x era technology. While it was more stable than Windows 9x (in my experience), a single faulty application (frequently a bad port from Windows) could bring it down. Instead of getting your work done, you had to sit there and wait for it to come back up (at least it had the good graces not to try to pin its crash on you, unlike Windows' telling you that you didn't shut the machine down properly).

Apple has to move on, or it will die. Its products need and deserve a modern, tough OS that can stand up to today's demands. They took 10 years, many false starts, and one near death experience, to get here. OS X, in its current form, was announced way back in May, 1998; which was four years ago. It will be two years after OS X.0 was released before they stop selling machines with OS 9 installed. And OS X still can run older programs (even many crufty ones) in Classic mode. How much slower and gentler could they possibly make this transition for you?!?

OS X has rekindled interest in the Mac. Slashdotters that once declared eternal hatred for Apple now proudly tote iBooks. Apple's decision to give the programming tools away for free has resulted in a great blooming of new software for the Mac. Individuals and companies that used to do NeXT software have started developing for the Mac. The open source community is porting every Linux app that doesn't sprout legs and run away. Young people, once daunted by the high cost of development tools, are learning to program and creating hordes of new freeware and shareware. Check out the Mac section in your local Borders, and you will see lots of programming books. I think I even saw a book on, gasp, Mac game programming!

Heck if you want a real miracle, look at the server side. Before OS X Server and XServe, Apple had practically nothing on the server side. In a matter of months, they went from nothing to being the fifth largest server maker in the US!

Thanks to OS X, Apple's future shines bright indeed. Which is good for you, because as hard as it may be to upgrade to an OS X only Mac, it is even harder if no one is around to make them. ;)

Mothra, Queen of Monsters and Apple's forever friend, first switched on this date in 1994 ("Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla").

Re:This bothers me, as a Mac supporter

[Thenomain]

This isn't much different, though more dramatic, than the switch from OS 6 to OS 7. Do you remember the "System 7 Savvy" stickers over everything?

There was much better backward compatability, but there were your inevitable programs which simply would not run in OS 7. Back then, Apple's answer was "Upgrade your programs".

There are reportedly ways to fake out the system into booting to OS 9. There was a post even here on Slashdot, but bugger me if I can find it.

Re:This bothers me, as a Mac supporter

[MacAndrew]

Of course I don't question the "need to move forward" and I've heard all the PR about OS X. My point is that when Apple has moved forward in the past, they've kept an eye over their shoulder to all those scrappy Mac users with legacy machines. OS X is a radical break; OK; will there be one every two years from now on? For most of us OS X is a marginal and expensive improvement, regardless of whether it is a necessary move for the company. I'm sure I use the benefits of OS X a middling amount; however, there are a surprising number of people out there happily using the fairly-stable 8.6, and I have to wonder how many people have upgraded older machines to OS X anyway, an OS that has only been out in semi-acceptable form for about a year. Certainly not the 1,000 or so Macs in our local school system. If Apple raises costs to school buyers (migrating software etc.) it may lose them; it's hard to sell school boards on what great vision Apple has.

I went and read the official Apple announcement -- apparently any bugs experienced by users are actually features. :)

I can still run ancient 68000 code from college CS, which is cool, but the Classic has failed in some significant cases, esp. anything involving older external hardware. Just how necessary it is for them to require OS X-only boot? How does it benefit us? Or are we mostly talking about Apple's bottom line?

And, to repeat myself, I mostly wonder what this portends for the future. Better to start asking Apple now (and I'm sure at least a few on their engineers read /. -- hi, how're you doing? Pass this on to the boss. :), than to find ourselves a few years down the road going WTF and Apple shrugging and saying, sorry, not supported, we figured we could make an extra $10 this way and, more importantly, we just don't care (not that we ever cared that much).

If that is the likely future (who knows what Apple's future is? certainly not Apple) I'm going to be looking for a new train.

Re:This bothers me, as a Mac supporter

[andrewski]

8.6 won't install on any machine made in the last few years anyway. Your old programs were not engineered to explode on command, so what are you worried about? Go ahead and continue to run 8.6 for the next decade. You don't seriously expect Apple to maintain 9 AND X do you? That would only be a detriment to both systems.

9 died four years ago, the corpse just hasn't stopped moving yet. Soon it will, thank God. X is not radical or new at all, it is proven technology dating back fifteen years. It isn't like Apple just announced X, the first public beta came out a long time ago. In case you can't put 2 and 2 together, Jobs ran NeXT before he came back to Apple. He brought with him a breath of fresh air, and something that is good for the computing world. In fact, I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to say that OS X saved Apple more than it has doomed it.

Re:Quark?

[MatthewRothenberg]

Assuming you're not just kidding ... :-)

QuarkXPress has long been the Big Kahuna of page-layout packages (after overtaking Aldus' pioneering PageMaker app back in the early '90s).

Professional publishers have invested billions of dollars into desktop workflows built around the Mac and XPress and involving all kinds of software plug-ins required to make all the hardware and software in a publishing operation work almost seamlessly. (Older versions of those plug-ins won't work with a Mac OS X version of XPress.)

Publishers are very conservative about making sweeping technological changes, but the whole shift to Mac OS X is ultimately going to force them to make some serious choices -- especially if there's a serious temporal disconnect between the arrival of Mac OS X-only Mac hardware and a Mac OS X-native version of their centerpiece software application.

Once you fold in all the imaging peripherals, client-server solutions, fonts, graphics applications, color-calibration technologies and whatnot, it's a wonder that stuff gets published at all. And when you're trying to use the same content for various print and electronic media, it gets even nuttier.

Even in these tight times (maybe especially in these tight times), there's a lot of money riding on keeping the whole house of cards stable, and the prospect of some sort of disjunct between publishers' longtime preferred platform and their longtime killer app is daunting.

The matter of costs

[ernst_mulder]

Everybody seems to forget how expensive the transition to OS X can be. Some of our design customers have many workstations, ranging from old 9600's (8100's even!) to modern G4's. NOBODY is thinking of getting rid of all the old stuff and putting modern OS X running G4's in their places. Heck, some of these machines are still running 8.1 or even 7.6.1! The only thing I see happening is that some new machines run OS X "to test the new system". And even that is quite an investment. ATM doesn't exist anymore so a Suitcase has to be bought. Other programs need to be updated (Photoshop, Illustrator, Office or MacLink, VPC). Sometimes the company's servers have to be upgraded as well (under OS X the FileMaker and Retrospect clients only do TCP/IP, Retrospect 5 doesn't do any AppleTalk anymore forcing an upgrade on other older machines). And the customer has to be taught how to cope with the new OS. Everything is different! Count out the hours, the upgrades, the production time lost. This (OS X) is a huge investment. Some customers are wondering if it's all worth it at all. We've been telling them it's not worth switching to PC's for the same reasons, and now they have to move to OS X which is almost just as much work.

So it's a good thing Apple's trying to force us. But it may be quite a pill to swallow for some. And I think "Classic" Mac OS machines will be around for some time to come.

BTW: Personally I LOVE OS X. I'm never going back.

Re:not Quark related -- Education probably had say

[jerde]

Apple's Education customers probably had some small part in this, too -- I screamed at Apple pretty loud saying we weren't ready, and they replied that we should buy our next year's machines by January.

Never mind that our next budget year isn't 'til June.

I think this will allow schools to make one more year's worth of purchases that are still OS 9 compatible.

One more year of OS X's maturation (both client AND server) will really really help schools make the transition.

(Not to mention we have to save our pennies and budget for new versions of Office, PhotoShop, etc., since we don't want to buy more RAM to run X just to use all classic apps...)

I'm still having bad dreams about how we're going to train everyone to use OS X, or how a mixed 9 and X environment will work.

(I don't care how flawed it was, people will MISS that darn old Chooser)

- Peter

Re:Screw Quark

[GMontag451]

Both Cocoa and Carbon *are* native APIs. There are ways to tell what kind of app you are running though. If it starts up Classic and you see non-Aqua windows, then its not native. If you do a Get Info on the app and see a "Open in Classic Environment" checkbox, then its Carbon. Note that is still a native app. If you right-click on the app and see "Show Package Contents" in the contextual menu, then its either a Cocoa app or a Carbon nib-based app. I'm not sure how you can tell the difference between the last two types short of attaching gdb and looking, but there is probably a way.

Good.

[GMontag451]

I'm hoping that they push back the non-booting computers indefinitely. A computer that can't boot 9 is a computer that can't boot from a CD, at least not usefully. The OS X install CD boots straight to an installer when you boot from a CD, and doesn't let you access any kind of file manager. Until someone comes up with a way to boot into a file manager in X from a CD, stopping booting from 9 is a bad idea.

Re:not Quark related -- Education probably had say

[jcsehak]

The sooner the educational market switches to OSX the better. I've been using Classic since 7.5, and one thing I didn't like about it is that stuff learned about the Mac OS was non-transferrable. You can learn to hack with ResEdit and write Applescripts and have fun on a Mac, but those skills were useless on any other OS. I always felt like if you want to get your hands dirty, you should run *nix. I knew Windows pretty well in high school, and when I got to college, I didn't even know what Unix was. Now we've got OS X. If you train kids on OS X, they'll be ready for any computing direction. If they go into a computer science field, it'll be an easy transition to a Unix or Linux box (not that they couldn't use a proprietary OS). If they become designers, audio engineers, or digital video specialists, they'll already know the most used OS. If they just want to be Sales Monkeys or gamers, well, they'll have to learn Windows.

It's not an issue of how flawed Classic was. What's important is that OSX is built on rock-solid open technology, the same that is being used on the world's best servers and workstations. I just got OSX a short while ago. Pretty soon, I'll be figuring out how to run a cron job. That knowledge is not Mac-specific. It's general computing knowledge. I like that.

They had it coming.

[jcsehak]

You know, Quark has eschewed Mac standards for as long as I can remember. They're UI was (is) totally proprietary, and their key shortcuts are a pain to figure out. Learning Quark was about as easy as learning a whole new OS. I always got the feeling it was totally hacked together. Maybe if they'd spent a little time making their program more standard, they wouldn't have this problem. I have no sympathy.