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.

[MatthewRothenberg]

>>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.

We ran a story about that on eWEEK a couple months back ... From what Quark's been saying at Seybold San Francisco and other gatherings, XPress 6.0 will represent a whole new code base, not just an upgrade optimized for Mac OS X's Carbon APIs.

Steve Jobs/Fred Ebrahimi love-in

[vilms]

I heard this too. My immediate reaction was that some heroic spin had been applied to the REAL story about the meeting. After the preliminary name-calling and fistfight, Steve and Fred were pulled apart, dusted down and made to sit through a mindnumbing PowerPoint presentation that told Fred:

Every other product you've launched APART from XPress has failed. Most of your user base is on the Macintosh. They're going to Mac OS X and you're holding them back. Meanwhile, Adobe has a product that works on X now...today... and can be used with a little prior knowledge of Photoshop and Illustrator.

Steve's slide was:
There's a significant percentage of major publishers who might just take this opportunity to dump the Macintosh and slide all those legacy Quark files over to Windows. Because, really, is that migration going to be any more fraught than a forced migration to X when you don't even know if your principal software (and attendant Xtensions) is coming along for the ride? XPress on Windows might be an unpalatable choice, but at least it's there. Right?

I've completely forgotten the point I was trying to make.

not Quark related

[BigBir3d]

I have the feeling that this is due to the fact that there will be no evolutionary jump in Mac hardware for the next 6 months, so to continue shipping machines with OS 9 and OS X is no big deal.

Qaurk's market has shrunken noticably enough that not offering OS X ported version is no big deal...

Dinosaurs...

Screw Quark

[stubear]

Apple should say tough shit to Quark. They've been holding Apple's release of OS X for far too long. Adobe has had OS X native versions fo their apps, including InDesign 2.0 (IMHO a far better DTP application than Quark), for over a year now. In fact, users of Quark Xpress should say screw Quark too as Quarj has heldp back the adoption of OS X by designers and the publishing industry. I know lots of designer who want to move to OS X but can't because of Quark and I tell them to do themselves a favor by dumping Quark and getting InDesign.

What good should that delay be?

[capmilk]

Does it really make a difference to publishing pros if Quark XPress is finally available on Mac OS X or not? I can hardly imagine that everybody is only waiting for Quark so they can switch to X.

What about existing workflows and applications for scanning, printing, ripping etc. that either don't exist on X or cost a fortune to update I can imagine that the inevitable switch from Photoshop 5.x to Photoshop 7 might prevent a couple of companies to do so.

Now, if Apple starts delivering OS X-only Macs, what exactly are OS 9-based companies going to do? They can't buy new fast Macs, as they are not supporting OS 9. It might well be cheaper to switch to Windows... Dangerous game, Apple.

Re:What good should that delay be?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I can hardly imagine that everybody is only waiting for Quark so they can switch to X.

That's exactly what's happening in a lot of print and design shops, though. They're buying brand-new dual-processor G4s and running OS 9 on them full-time just for Quark. Every other program they'd need runs under OS X-- even though a few of them only run in Classic-- but they have to stay on OS 9 for Quark.

And it's not even that Quark is that great. InDesign has it beat in almost every category. But there are millions of Quark files out there that people still need to use. Dropping Quark completely just isn't a practical option.

What about existing workflows and applications for scanning, printing, ripping etc. that either don't exist on X or cost a fortune to update

Virtually everything you'd need to run a print shop has been ported to OS X. Practically everybody's using a PDF workflow these days, and OS X has better PDF support than any other OS. As for ripping and printing, all of that is being done with Windows. The Windows RIP just sits there in the corner, humming to itself, and chews through PDF all day and night. The interactive tools, though, are all on OS X except for Quark.

Re:What good should that delay be?

[frankie]

hardly imagine that everybody is only waiting for Quark so they can switch to X.

Exactly 100% of the Mac-based publishing pros that I know personally (1 local tabloid and 2 unrelated freelancers) are indeed sticking with OS9 solely because of Quark. They really want to come over to crash-free OSX, but QXP is their livelihood.

I've suggested InDesign, but they don't want to risk problems with converting their old files.

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: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.

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

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.