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This has been quite a week on the OS X Odyssey trail -- I perhaps should have renamed the column "OS X - Debating Society" for the duration. The basic controversy, however, dates back almost to the first Odyssey postings, as it became evident early on to both myself in readers that the journey was not going to be one of unqualified praise and celebration of Apple's new OS.

I say "became evident" in both cases, because I approached this project last November with an open mind, and I had both hoped and expected that I would be switching to OS X for production work sometime in the early months of 2002, after an initial learning and orientation run-up.

Indeed, I began planning my OS X transition strategy in early 2001, and made an unsuccessful attempt, assisted by my OS X - savvy son, to install the Public Beta on my WallStreet PowerBook. For some reason, after trying everything we could think of, plus many readers' suggestions, we had no luck. The WallStreet and OS X seemed to have a mutual, irreconcilable incompatibility -- still undetermined. (Linux installed on the WallStreet with no problem).

Consequently, I decided that it would be necessary to accelerate my system upgrade schedule. Since my son seemed reasonably happy using OS X on his 333 MHz Lombard (although this computing needs are very different from mine), I figured that a 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook should provide reasonable performance with the new OS (remember; this was in early 2001), a and I ordered a new leftover 500 MHz machine. Unfortunately, I was too late with that one -- orders had outstripped supply of the l/o units by 6 to 1.

In May of last year, Dan Knight at Low End Mac offered me a very lightly used (three weeks standing in for his ailing TiBook) G4 Cube at a reasonable price, so I took a foray back into using a desktop machine. That Cube was a blast speed - wise compared with my old WallStreet, but it also turned out to be a lot bulkier than I had expected once situated in my workstation with all its peripherals attached, and I realized that I have become more of a portable computer (or at least small computer) guy than I had previously imagined.

The Cube seemed to handle the OS X public beta quite nicely, but I didn't experiment with it a whole lot, and soon reverted to the WallStreet and OS 9.1 for production.

Then when the opportunity presented itself last fall to swap the Cube even for a used Pismo in excellent condition with Zip and SuperDisk expansion bay modules included, I grabbed it -- the Pismo having been my original first choice anyway.

By that time, the OS X final and 10.1 update had been released, and they installed without a hitch on the Pismo's newly partitioned 20 GB hard drive.

I spent the first three weeks getting used to the Pismo in OS 9.1, and then returned to the WallStreet for production, and dedicated the faster PowerBook to this Odyssey, which I launched in November, my first real attempt to do actual work with OS X.

My immediate impression was disappointment thaton a machine with more than twice the clock speed of the minimum OS X supports spec., Finder performance was so sluggish. The Pismo had 256 megabytes of RAM when I got it, so I upgraded to 640 MB, and was doubly chagrined and that there was hardly any performance improvement, although having that much RAM capacity makes OS 9 fly.

Working my way through the 10.1.1, 10.1.2, 10.1.3, and 10.1.4 upgrades did result in modest performance improvements, but no for substantial speed boost. I downloaded the 10.1.5 oupdater as well, but never got around to installing it.

Along this road I have reported my progress in this column. By Easter, I made a good faith attempt to switch to production in OS X. That lasted two or three days. I tried again in the late spring or early summer with a similar outcome. OS X just slowed me down too much compared with OS 9, even OS 9 on the old 233 MHz WallStreet.

And as I expressed by the misgivings and frustratios with OS X, I began to receive a fair bit of mail alleging that I was operating on an anti- OS X bias, or even that I hate OS X. Neither has been true from the beginning. I didn't go through the effort, expense, and hassle of getting new hardware (twice), beginning nearly a year before I would otherwise have upgraded from the WallStreet, if I hadn't been serious about this project.

It now appears, in 20/20 hindsight, that I didn't set my hardware sights high enough, but remember, when I ordered that first Pismo, the fastest ToBook available was also 500 MHz, and the top iBook was a 466 MHz G3. OS X'sAltivec dependency for decent performance had not been well-publicized, least of all by Apple, who were and are still selling G3 machines as OS X - ready. And Quartz Extreme hadn't even registered on the radar screens.

I don't hate OS X. It's a nice operating system, even in the "ancient" 10.1.4 build that I'm using right now, and I don't doubt a bit that it's even nicer in 10.2 Jaguar.

However, ***for the hardware I have and the sort of work I do with computers,*** OS 9 is still a better OS for me, and I don't apologize for making that affirmation. The best tool for the job. This isn't a zero-sume equation. OS 9 doesn't have to be bad for OS X to be good, or vice-versa. I'm speaking from my personal experience, and not from prejudice or bias against OS X.

Lately, but other insinuation has cropped up -- to wit that as a Mac journalist, so to speak, unless I'm using the "latest and greatest" version of OS X, I should shut up about OS X issues. I find that attitude somewhat bizarre.

There are many more readers out there in the Mac OS community running various versions of the Classic OS or older versions of OS X on no more powerful computers than my Pismo, and who don't rush to buy or download every new Mac OS upgrade on the day of its release. Indeed, plenty of users are still happily doing professional production work in OS 8.6. I think that my observations about using OS X but less than ideal machinery are very much of relevance, and hopefully interest to that very large cohort at least.

And for the record, I advise newcomers to the Mac platform to ignore OS 9 and concentrate on learning X. It's the future of the Mac platform, and I've never contended otherwise. However, in the meantime, I'm still getting excellent, productive service of OS 9 while my slower-than-expected progress down the OS X Odyssey road continues.

And thanks for the conversation, whether you agree or disagree.

Benchmarks are peculiar things...

From Marvin Price

Last night I was about to work on a sick iBook, and bring it up to OS X. So I booted it in Firewire target disk mode, connected it to my desktop G4, and started the disk utility program to making an image of the hard disk. Always backup client machines before you touch them because people invariably lie about having all their files in a safe place.

At the same time, I started a copy of the backup of another computer going to DVD.

Right around the same moment, I decided to send a bunch of images converted from BMP to a proprietary interactive TV format back to their owner via FTP.

Meanwhile, iTunes was streaming the local National Public Radio outlet and I was getting angrier by the minute, so I decided to check e-mail. I noticed a significant drop in junk-mail getting through, almost none made it since upgrading to the new mail program.

One of my e-mails concerned an associate was having trouble with DNS queries on her domain, so I bounced into the Terminal utility and used NSLOOKUP, and DIG to ferret out that the problem had to do with how her domain was set up on the root server, requiring changes on register.com.

I needed an e-mail address that was still in Entourage, since I hadn't moved all my addresses over to the address book yet. While scrolling through Entourage, I noticed a Quicktime clip of a friends cat. I played it a couple of times, and then proceeded to get the e-mail address, but suddenly Entourage unexpectedly quit. YET NOTHING ELSE WAS BOTHERED! I launched Entourage again found the address, went back to the mail program and sent my message.

All this was going on actively on the same machine. I realized that OS X is changing the way I work. I'm much more of a multitasker than I used to be. Time was I would have started that disk copy and sat there and watched it until it completed, or watched TechTV.

I thought about your benchmarks on OS 9. I decided to try duplicating the workload I just created under OS X on my iMac under 9, but it couldn't get past the initial disk copy. Each time I'd ask it to do something additional, all the other tasks would stop, or slow to an almost imperceptible crawl.

There is productivity and there is productivity. Yeah, scrolling may be a bit quicker, and resizing windows might be faster but overall, when I look at X, all I can say is "Productivity, OS X is thy name."

P.S.

One of the interesting things that Windows XP can do is turn off the beauty. You can tweak XP performance so that all the extra pretty graphics are turned off and the system essentially looks like the "classic" Windows system. It speeds up the general mousing around stuff dramatically. Perhaps Apple could do something like that?

Hi Marvin;

I don't doubt your word a bit. OS X multitasks a lot more happily and efficiently than OS 9. In fact, one of the side-effects of my OS X Odyssey is that I am now much more inclined to multitask things even in OS 9 than I used to be -- as you say, one used to just wait.

However, my multitasking needs are usually very modest (which is why they work, albeit slowly, in OS 9), so while it's nice to have that capability, it doesn't speed up my workday a lot.

Re: "turning off the beauty," YES! -- that would be great. I'm not really joking when I say I would be happy with the appearance of the System 6 interface if it would speed things up in OS X.

Charles

Don't listen to the bleating!

From Elton Wallace

Dear Mr. Moore.

It appears you have encountered the wrath of the Jaguar faithful. I wanted you to know that you are not alone! You are one of the few truthful Mac journalists. You call'em as you see'em. You don't just regurgitate the company line. X may be the future, but it is NOT ready for everyday use!

I am willing to try X because I am an incurable computerphile, but I know a group of die-hard Maccies who will not consider making the switch. When they can no longer acquire a Mac that runs MacOS, they say they will switch to Windows. Some have made that jump already and are much more satisfied than expected.

I'm hoping X will eventually be the greatest OS on the planet, but I ain't gonna hold my breath.

Elton

Hi Elton;

I'm much more optimistic about the prospects for OS X than some of your friends seem to be. Switching to Windows, with all the bureaucratic hassle with product activation, and so on, seems like a poor solution to frustration with X. My son is a full time Windows XP tech support person, and he's more of an OS X fan than ever since starting that job.

Thanks for the thumbs-up about my writing. I try to be an honest broker.

Charles

Speed...

From Paul Delcour

Having followed all kinds of Mac (and PC) discussions over the years, I am utterly amazed that Mac users accept a slowdown of their beloved Macs upgrading to Jaguar. Come on people. The argument for years has been speed, be it MHz's or harddrive rotation or waht have you. Now all of a sudden demands have shifted towards totally different aspects of an OS. And Windows is nowhere to be heard of in these disussions.

Whenever I see a Jaguar car, I see grace, not neccesarily speed. Is this why OS X is called Jaguar? The basic idea of OS X is very good indeed, but to me it is an absolute sin to have to hand in speed when we've just gained valuable amounts of it.

Linux is being hailed as a wonderful OS. It is Unix based as well, requires far less RAM and is much faster than Jaguar. Where did Apple made these terrible programming mistakes?

:-)

Paul Delcour

Hi Paul;

Mistake or otherwise, the answer to your rhetorical question is: "Aqua."

I expect that OS X would really scream with a more modest and spartan GUI shell runing on top of it. As I remarked to Marvin above, a System 6 style alterantive would be great for us non eye candy addicts who do very little graphics work.

Charles

Re: Cheap OS X upgrade

From Eric Matthieu

Hi Charles,

In your response to Lee Lamb, you wondered if your daughter's university had a Mac education outlet. Regardless of what school she's attending, Apple's own web site may render the matter of a physical outlet moot.

For schools in the US, go to Apple.com>Store>Education; you should be able to view an extensive list of eligible colleges and universities - some that may even surprise you, and I know for certain some do not have an outlet located on campus. And yes, Jaguar can be had there for $69 (US).

Without having to specify the university, you can also do this on the Apple Store's Canada site (Apple.com>Store>Worldwide>Canada>Education). There, Jaguar is listed for $105 (Canadian). At the regular Apple Store (Canada) site, it is $195.

That said, I wonder if you might do better shopping around. We are talking the Apple Store, after all!

Hope that helps.
Eric

Thanks for the info, Eric.

Can$90 is a pretty decent discount. :-) I'll check it out.

Charles

Mac OS X Unleashed

From Robb Neumann

Charles,

Thanks for responding to my question about resources for command line usage. I'll definitely check "Mac OS X Unleashed." Your review certainly makes it sound as though it'll be the best resource for someone new to using Terminal.

Thanks again!
Robb Neumann

Hi Robb;

Glad to have been able to steer you in a promising direction in your quest.

Charles

Re: Newer is better

From Ramon K. Talley

Good evening, Charles:

I thought I’d put in my two cent’s (pretty close to face value) response to Alvin’s analogy of wine skins

"From Alvin Chan
Good morning. It has been said in the Good Book, "do you put new wine in old wine skin, if you do the old wineskin will burst." We just have to adjust for the better and it is for laws and principles. Though I guess three will always be a crowd just like Linux is having no direction and no point to divide things up even more......I believe to make it even better it really must get rid of OS 9 in a way to make the new Mac more affordable by exchanging/donating (donating gives the user their space which also has a price, no need for discounts from Apple with donations because God bless,
Alvin"

“Newer is better” and Apple. Aside from pretty much knocking any theologian off his throne with laughter over the hermeneutical horrors of the thought of comparing “new wine” to “Jaguar”, the pragmatic side of the “better, new and improved” argument holds neither wine nor water.

Succinctly, I can get a wineskin (container) for about $5.00 last time I checked and, depending on one’s “gusto” of the vine’s selection, anywhere from $5.00 to $45.00 should do the trick. So the innovative “embiber” would be all set for an outlay of around $50.00, max.

Mac innovation “improvement” from where my pocket book glares, would be looking at around $2000.00. Wouldn’t it be a more feasible option to drink some older wine, and “peck away” on an OS 9 – 10.1.5?

Either option is pretty sobering.
Cordially,
Ramón

Hi Ramon;

Given my actual needs, I'm getting along quite well with the old wine in the old skins.

For journalistic purposes, I have another agenda to pursue, I guess.

Charles

I've been through all the angst before

From Gareth

Hello, Charles

As for the argument raging about the end of dual booting on Macs. I can't bring myself to care very much. You see, I've been through all the angst before with Apple's suffocation and then killing of the Apple II line. There were some half-hearted and too late attempts to reach out to us. On the whole, however, it was "bye, and thanks" or alternatively "buy (a new and incompatible computer) and thanks." What is best for a company (and therefore its fiduciary duty) may not be the best decision for its customers. Any warm and fuzzy feelings one may have for Apple the company are illusory. Save the feelings for one of its particularly praiseworthy products. :-) Oh, and be thankful we've got Classic.

-Gareth

Hi Gareth;

I don't think I've ever fallen victim to having the warm & fuzzies for Apple Computer.

BTW, I think it hazily recall that an Apple II compatibility card was available for my old (c.1993) LC 520.

I missed out on the Apple II era.

Charles

OS X Jaguar

From James Boyd
Charles,

I have to join the crowd that believes you are unfairly and unwisely anti OS X. I know you are very comfortable with OS 9. It was the last, best OS of a day gone by. It still works great for a large number of people (evidenced by the number of Mac users still staunchly avoiding OS X), but it is not the future. You are welcome to use it as long as it suits you and there will be no reason in the near future for you to HAVE to switch. But talking like OS X is still a dog slow, cranky beta is not even close to accurate. Just because it is different, or lacks some things you particularly like, does not make it bad.

I think I am similar to you in many ways. I am a conservative, a die hard Mac fan in every way, a publisher (of sorts) and a Microsoft hater. I have a Pismo as my main operating machine. I also have a B&W 400, a G4 733 and an iBook 500. Every machine contributes to my income in one fashion or another. I am a late adopter and only changed to OS X at the beginning of this year. My G4 is my only truly fast machine, especially by today's standards.

I recently installed Jaguar on 3 of my machines including the Pismo. I have not experienced a single problem with upgrading and all of my programs (MS Office, Quicken, AccountEdge, Dreamweaver, GoLive, and Photoshop) hum along without a hitch. Jaguar is considerably snappier and has made my Pismo so much more enjoyable to use that I have dropped the notion of upgrading it any time soon. My G4 remains booted into OS 9 for the simple fact that I can't afford to upgrade Final Cut and DVD Pro just yet.

Other than the aforementioned G4 for video editing, my other machines have never had to boot into OS 9 all of this year. I have crashed twice, and both times were more my fault than Apple's. OS X is absolutely rock solid, industrial strength kick-butt programming. Once you get over the newness, you will never go back. I think that is probably a common experience for OS X addicts. I can tell you that going back and forth will never develop a comfort level, as your mental and physical memory will leave you unsettled. If you could use Jag for a couple months without ever running back to 9, you'd be hooked. I'm pretty confident in that statement.

Of course, if you don't ever want to upgrade programs and hardware, perhaps OS 9 is the more suitable OS for your aging machines and software. Classic is a transitional function at best and OS X native software is far superior in performance. I think it is only good for the occasional need, otherwise booting into 9 or having a dedicated 9 machine is a better option. I must admit that I have a penchant for the latest and greatest, as is evidenced by my credit card bill. I am upgrading my software to X as quick as I can.

It is possible that you are one of those people who thinks things were much better back in the 50s (possibly evidenced by your antique car fetish) and just don't like anything newfangled or off the beaten path. I would suggest that if you don't modify your thought process a little, you may find yourself alone on that overgrown, abandoned path in the not too distant future.

Don't get me wrong. I still drive a 93 sedan with 146,000 miles. There's nothing wrong with getting as much mileage as possible out of a dependable machine. But OS X is clearly starting to look like a Mercedes versus an Edsel. It took some time, but OS X combined with incredible industrial design and high quality machines is Apple's only hope. In fact, any company making a decent profit in this economy is a pretty good thing, and Apple is profitable. I believe that if OS 9.5 was the present system and the boxes were still beige, Apple would be nothing but a fond memory.

I do think that unless you are able and willing to spend a committed amount of time using Jag every day for everything, you need to temper your sentiments, and especially adjust your official assessments. OS X is different, especially for those of use that have been along for the ride from the 512K machines and OS 6. But for every way that 9 was better, I can think of three ways that 9 was worse. My opinion of course and luckily we are all still entitled to those. Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings.

James

Hi James;

I've addressed many of your comments in today's commentary.

A few supplementary observations.

I'm interested that I don't use any of the software programs that you mention, so the advantage of X in them may be a lot more compelling than with my application suite.

My main software axe, Tex Edit Plus, is slower in X than it is in the OS 9 native version, even running in Classic Mode, although some of the new features in the OS X version are making it quite enticing despite the poky scrolling and menu activation.

I actually don't find switching back and forth much of a problem. I'm quite comfortable navigating in OS X. I just end up waiting more.

I also don't resist change on principle, but the change has to make things better on average for it to make sense. At this point in time, OS 9 does the job better for me.

Charles

Mouse clicking

From Eric Cooper

The latest update of Jaguar doesn't seem to fix the problem that you have with click and drag. But I got to thinking that it would be a kludgy, but simple thing to run a wire from your mouse button to a floor switch.

Eric

Thanks for the thought, Eric, but that would be a bit too kludgy for me, being as I use a bunch of different pointing devices, and currently have five hooked up to the Pismo if you count the built-in trackpad.

Charles

We're making progress...

From Wayne Folta

Charles,

Seems like we're whittling down the points of disagreement/misunderstanding, so we're making progress...

> Among the examples you cite I see about ten categories where OS 9 was > faster and two where Jag was faster.

You overlook ties, which count on the side of OS 9 NOT "whupping" OS X. When you count ties , it comes out 10 cases where OS 9 is faster and 8 where it is not, which is nearly even, as I said. And we're not even getting into the issues of whether the test cases themselves are representative or sensible and whether they leave out test cases that would be obvious major speed wins for OS X.

> The ones that grabbed me were the scrolling speeds, since I do a LOT > of scrolling through documents and I use PhotoShop once in a blue moon > ( have an old, 3.something version kicking

I seriously doubt you scroll through a document by holding down the mouse on the scrollbar arrow. If you're scrolling slowly (reading, maybe) you'll click on the scrollbar arrows as you read down. If you're moving faster, you click in the scrollbar area to move by page, and if you want to move faster, you drag the scrollbar. That's been standard Mac usage forever.

And that's just the way scrolling works for me on a wimpy old 400MHz G3 running 10.2, scrolling through a 500-file list view: 15 seconds holding down on the scrollbar arrow, 4 seconds by page, and 1 second with scrollbar. As I intend to move faster, it does.

So the Finder scrolling test does measure speed in one sense, but certainly not in a Real World sense. You just don't sit there pressing on the scrollbar arrow if your intent is to quickly page down, or to jump to the end. The bottom line is: when Charles is sitting at his new, future Mac, scrolling in his production environment using MacOS X 10.3, will it scroll as fast as it needs to so that he's not held back? And the artificial scrolling test says nothing about that.

> I agree about the wake-up times. I LOVE the instant wake-up in OS X > compared to the 10-15 sec it takes in OS 9.2.2. However, I scroll a > lot more than I wake up my computer, and I most of the time

> But there is a tremendous difference between scrolling speeds with X > (10.1.4) vs. 9.2.2 in, say, Tex Edit Plus (my most-used application) > (the latest native versions respectively. This does slow me down > significantly in X.

Slows you down significantly in an old version of OS X, running on an old piece of hardware. Which has no relationship to the MacOS-X-only machine you'll buy in six months.

And this is the crux of your error. You are reasoning:

1. OS X 10.1 is uncomfortably slow on my old and creaky Mac. 2. OS 9.2.2 is noticeably faster than OS X 10.2 on a current-model Mac. -----
Therefore: 10.2 will be uncomfortably slow on a future-model Mac.

It simply does not follow! You need to compare 9.2.2 on your current Mac to 10.2 on a new Mac, and even then you're underestimating the FUTURE speed of a future version of OS X plus a future version of your chosen hardware. (Desktops just got bumped up by 25% in speed. It will trickle down to the laptops.)

> When did I ever say OS X was "unusably slow?" What I have said is that > it is substantially slower for the sort of work I do than OS 9.2.2, > which is an objective fact. I can work faster in OS 9.1 on my

(In terms of the quote marks in my original note, English uses quotes to directly quote and also to indicate sarcasm. Unfortunately, I used quotes in both senses in the same note. I didn't mean to say you used the exact word "unusable", just to highlight the sense of your criticisms.)

Hi Wayne;

Progress is good. ;-)

I guess it depends on how you count ties. I tend to discount them in calculating "wins." Sports-minded, I guess.

In point of fact, I do usually scroll by dragging the cursor down the text field or using the scroll arrows, or by hitting the Page Up/Page Down/Home/End keys. I rarely use the scroll thumb or click in the scroll bar. OS X so far has been slower at this. It's a real world test for me.

I just put the Pismo to sleep and woke it up. 7.5 seconds, and that's with 15 applications running and about a dozen windows open on the very cluttered desktop - OS 9.2.2, AppleTalk off.

My most likely next new Mac looks like an iBook, which is still a G3, so I'm not terribly optimistic about dramatic performance gains.

I would say, undesirably slow. I haven't stopped using OS X. I did a few hours work in it yesterday, and am into it several times a week. It's just less convenient with one machine.

I can't rationally convince myself that doing my daily work on a slower platform makes any sense.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore

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