Cool Mac Gear

Most of the letters response to my commentary yesterday on the slow pace of Mac OS X adoption by veteran Mac users indicate that OS 9 is not dead yet by a long shot. You can read the reader responses in an OS X Odyssey extra edition today, and if you're a Macworld Magazine subscriber, make sure to check out Matt Deatherage's "The Big Picture" column inside the back cover of the June, 2003, issue as well.

" I'm no theologian," Deatherage writes, "but I believe that there must be a special level of hell reserved for Apple executives who think the only thing the NeXT operating system needed to succeed was a larger group of people forced to use it. "

Most Mac users seem to agree, at least passively, he observes. After more than two years of public release, OS X has only been adopted by roughly 5 million of the estimated 30 million Mac users worldwide, and that figure pretty much matches the number of machines Apple has sold with OS X pre-installed since May, 2001.

Despite the passionate enthusiasm of a minority of Macheads who are unequivocal OS X fans, and another, probably larger faction of us who are doggedly and deliberately plugging away at the OS X transition, X has not exactly taken the world by storm --even the Mac niche of the world.

Deatherage, like me, is not immune to OS X's virtues and charms -- crashless stability, preemptive multitasking, protected memory, increased security, and its stunning appearance. However, he blames at least a substantial part of the sluggish rate of OS X adoption on what he perceives as the dogged determination of the NeXT cadre that came to Apple with Steve Jobs in 1997 to ram NeXT down users throats whether they like it or not.

Enough with the serial excuses about users waiting for OS X native versions of MS Office, Photoshop, and most recently Quark XPress, says Deatherage. There can't be that many people delaying the switch until Quark X is available. No, the real problem is "that OS X is full of disruptive changes that don't provide any benefits."

He notes that graphics professionals, for example, are used to working in one program that they want to run as fast as possible, and OS X is significantly slower than OS 9 for such applications, and indeed slower in general.

But it's not just speed. There is also the perverse elimination of popular and convenience features that peole loved in OS 9 for no other reason than, at least in Deatherage's view, the arrogant stubbornness of the NeXT contingent, "despite massive marketplace rejection. "

He notes that despite an avalanche of complaints over the past two years to "drop the attitude and make OS X more like the Mac," Apple continues to stonewall, and people who are very productive in OS 9 continue to ignore OS X.

If Apple wants to accelerate the draggy transition to OS X Deatherage advises them to "abandon the NeXT the elitism. "

"There is no technical reason OS X can't restore any of the disfavored [by the NeXT group] features," he writes. "they're not present now because Apple management doesn't want you to have options that threaten NeXT's place in history."

I agree that it seems so. I like many things about OS X. I have switched to OS X and am not likely to revert to OS 9. However, I also find many things about working with OS X annoying and frustrating. I really miss the speed and responsiveness, and the convenient, flexible, and customizable Finder features of OS 9.

Then, as I noted in my commentary yesterday, there's the crappy and flaky input device support in X; the buggy OS 10.2 version upgrades; the labour-intensive and user-unfriendliness involved with the care and feeding of OS X. With OS 9, I could just install the system and forget it for months, running Norton Disk Doctor or Disk Warrior a few times a year to check for directory corruption, of which there was usually very little or none.

I persevere with OS X partly for journalistic research reasons, and partly because I really like some of the software that's only available for OS X. As noted, I also enjoy OS X's stability, crash-proofness, and preemptive multitasking. But while I counsel new Mac users to learn OS X and forget about OS 9 except for emergencies and extraordinary circumstances, where it can come in handy (especially if you have a Mac that will still boot from it), I find it challenging hard to make a compelling advocacy case for switching to those who are presently satisfied with the performance they are getting from the Classic Mac OS, in which I am myself still at least 15% to 20% faster at production work than I am Mac OS X.

Is Apple listening?

All the utilities you need to optimize X have been rolled into one

From anonymous

Charles,

Cocktail now has pretty much all the functions you need to optimize Mac OS X. It has clear cache, update prebinding, repair permissions, run daily, weekly, monthly cron scripts. The only thing it won't do is what the Jaguar CD Installer does if you boot up from it, namely, open Disk Utility from the Installer menu and select First Aid tab to Repair Disk (You'll need to select the hard drive you wish to repair before repairing it). It is recommended before you use Cocktail to quit all open applications.

Cocktail may be found here:

http://www2.dicom.se/cocktail/index.html

Remember I was able to get Mac OS X running as fast as 9 on my Powerbook G3/233 when I had 192 MB of RAM, and upgraded the hard drive to a 5400 RPM drive, and made sure I had at least 2.5 GB free of hard disk space free on my Mac OS X partition. Suggest you look into doing the same to optimize your slower machines in Mac OS X. As for wanting new features in Mac OS X you can always post requests here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

and I recommend your readers do the same.

Remember anyone who has Norton Systemworks or Utilities installed on their system is likely to see a slowdown and these should be removed. HP peripherals had a slowdown till Mac OS X 10.2.2. So have USB floppy drives. As it stands I see the only safe versions of Jaguar are 10.2, 10.2.3, and 10.2.6. Thank goodness Apple has made combo updates available to jump between them and if you buy the retail Jaguar CD you can install 10.2 over again using http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107120 Archive and Install without erasing your user or network settings.

The biggest problem I see for X migration is people holding on to old software. There are plenty of Mac OS X native applications and hardware listed here:

http://www.macmaps.com/macosxnative.html

I would not move to Mac OS X, unless I'm willing to stop using all my Mac OS 9 software, and I mean ALL.

If a problem arises with X as far as kernel panics, you need to look at your Hardware Test CD to see if there are any errors, remove any extra RAM, and see if the motherboard needs replacing through AppleCare.

X shouldn't kernel panic, and if it is, either it has been corrupted by Norton (which if you don't have you don't have to worry about), or some hardware doesn't work well with it. RAM that worked perfectly well in 9 has been known to break down in X.

Sincerely,
anonymous

Hi A.

I agree about Cocktail, which I have been using through several versions now, and it's great.

I don't have an OS X version of Norton SystemWorks. I boot into OS 9 when I want to run one of the Norton utilities, but I've only ever used them as freestanding applications, even in the Classic OS.

I agree with you about Jaguar versions for the most part, although 10.2.1 seems to work well on the iBook and 10,2,4 was rock solid on the Pismo. 10,2,6 seems to have settled down on the Pismo as well.

I find that Classic mode works quite well. I just went nine days without a reboot, and had Classic running the whole time. Until there are OS X native versions of WannaBe and Color It!, I ain't gonna give up Classic Mode. There are no OS X native substitutes for those two apps. that come close to being as fast and slick, and I use them both intensively.

I've only ever had one kernel panic, and that was with a piece of alpha test software for which KPs were a known issue. But I steered clear of 10,2,5.

Charles

Printers and OS X

From John Dennis

I had an Epson printer and Epson was taking for ever to decide which ones they would update. Because of this I bought a Canon printer one of their low end models and gave away the Epson. This was the one thing that annoyed me the most about switching over. Once I got this taken care of it was easy going after that.

MyTV X v2.1 Unstable In Powerbook Using OS10.2.6

Ralph DeMartino

Hi, I have been trying to get my MyTV to behave with my PowerBook and OSX for a long time. The beta version sort of works OK but it gets stuck when trying to quit it requiring a forced quit application. The middle release requiring mega processing power is useless. It sucks all the processor power and makes doing other tasks with the TV active impossible. The latest version which takes advantage of the graphics card works great on first install and after that it goes unstable. Its a shame they are having so much problems with it. I miss the TV capability on the PB as compared to my old PM6500 with the ATI TV graphics card. Also I need to import some old video tapes into DV format for archiving before the tapes are no longer usable.

It still runs great in OS 9.1 on my older 300Mhz iBook, but will not run in Classic Mode on the PowerBook.

Maybe if Eskape knew more Mac users were interested they would put some more effort into it. I would like to buy the smaller TVtoGo, but without stable OSX software.....................

Sincerely,
Ralph DeMartino

Hi Ralph;

I have no experience with MyTV, but it sounds like the OS X software still needs some work.

I would be surprised it it ever works in Classic Mode, however.

Charles

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

CM

Charles W. Moore