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My Odyssey column yestarday, "Reasons For NOT Switching To OS X," elicited a healthy response from readers, buth agreeing and disagreeing, which is what I expected. From day one, there has been a polarization of perspectives on OS X, roughly breaking along the lines of those who embraced it enthusiastically and were/are willing to excuse (and sometimes rationalize?) its shortcomings and angularities, and those who took a more critical "I'm from Missouri" approach to switching.

As regular readers of this column know well, I'm a member of the latter camp. It took me nearly 18 months of gradually warming up to OS X (and improvements in system performance) for me to be persuaded to switch to X as my production OS. I now have switched, and will not be going back, but I still resist OS X political correctness. I am willing, nay -- eager -- to give OS X praise and credit where it's merited, but I'm not disposed to wallpapering over its shortcomings, of which it still has quite a few. Hopefully there will be substantially fewer after the OS X 10.3 Panther release later this year.

In the meantime, OS X 10.2 Jaguar has plenty to recommend it if the caveats I cited yesterday do not apply to the sort of work you do with computers. If you're a general computer user with a reasonably fast Mac, or someone new to the Mac or to computing at all, then forget about OS 9. There is really no point in learning it, although if your machine is capable of booting from it I suggest keeping it aboard (preferably on its own hard drive partition), as it can come in handy for troubleshooting purposes, and I am an advocate of having at least two bootable systems installed.

If you're a Mac veteran, there are also many reasons (more all the time) to seriously consider making the switch soon, if you haven't already. Here are some of them:

Applications and Compatibility

If you've observed the shrinking number of new apps. upgrades listed daily on VersionTracker, you have an indication of what I'm talking about. OS 9 stalwarts are being more and more left behind as developer interest in the Clasic platform wanes. There are fewer and fewer up to date browsers available for OS 9. The only ones currently still being developed are iCab and the opensource WamCom derivative of Mozilla. Netscape 7.0 and Internet Explorer 5.x are the last versions of those browsers supporting OS 9. And then there's the stuff that's never been available for OS 9 at all. If you're happy with using 2001-2002 vintage software indefiitely, then you're well-covered with OS 9, but if you want access to the newest, coolest stuff, then it's time to switch.

Protected Memory and Preemptive Multitasking

These two features are also significant advantages OS X has over the Classic OS. While I find that I end up rebooting OS X nearly as often as I did the later versions of OS 9, you are largely protected from being forced to reboot at inconvenient times. While OS X applications can still lock up or "unexpectedly quit," they don't take the whole system down with them. The Force Quit and Stop Process functions in OS X are more useful and graceful tools for regaining control over your computer than MacsBug was in the Classic OS. And while I continue to maintain that OS 9 is a more efficient production platform in terms of raw speed and responsiveness, that contention must be qualified by how useful you find OS X's ability to do a bunch of things at once. Of course the more processor power you have avaiable, the more useful that ability is. With more modest machines, you can end up doing a lot of things simultaneously, but very slowly.

OS X Services

I would venture that Services are one of the more underutilized cool features of OS X. I certainly haven't yet begun to exploit Services to anything like its full potential, mainly because I still use several non-Cocoa applications extensively, and they don't support Services, but I'm becoming addicted to some of the Services features in apps that do support it, and it has great potential.

Ease of Networking

Once you get the hang of it, networking in OS X is a breeze. I use only a minimal home Ethernet network, but I'm sure OS X's networking facility looms even larger in importance for users on larger networks, especially if Windows machines are involved.

I'm sure others can think of many complimentary reasons why switching to OS X makes sense, and is a pretty good trip. Despite my continued criticisms, which are indended to be constructive, I quite enjoy using OS X now. There is plenty of room for improvement, but there's a lot to like right now. If you are still fence-sitting, I would suggest at this point that it makes economic sense to wait for the Panther release, unless Apple can be persuaded that it's in their best interest from a PR perspective to offer people who purchase Jaguar after, say, August 1 a free upgrade to Panther. I'm not holding my breath on that one, however.

re: Reasons For NOT Switching To OS X

From Chris Long

Hey Charles --

re: OS X Odyssey 363 - Reasons For NOT Switching To OS X

i gave the MacFixIt article only a quick glance, but unless I missed it, I believe that you both left out a big problem with OSX: fonts and font management.

As you know, I do design/prepress all day and use a boatload of different typefaces on a regular basis. i can't tell you how much I miss OS9 running with Adobe's ATM Deluxe (font manager) -- it just WORKED. Unfortunately Adobe hasn't updated ATM Deluxe for OSX, so i'm stuck using Suitcase, which is okay, and more-or-less works, but there are real problems now and then ...

i know; Apple is introducing Font Book with OSX 10.3 (what is it? "Panther") -- time will tell if/how well that one works. I'm crossing my fingers.

Overall, i love the apps available for OSX, but I'm not a big fan of the OS itself. If I could run Safari and Watson and a few others in OS9, that's what I'd be using every day. OSX is still a slug. This topic, of course, will never die; some are still insisting it's fast enough, but I can't honestly believe that anyone out there would contest that OS9 is faster at doing nearly everything/anything. Doesn't really matter. Apple has made their decision, and it's time to move on.

Keep up the good work.

Chris

Hi Chris;

You're right, both about the fonts/font management issue and that both I and MacFixIt failed to address it specifically in our respective treatments of the general topic. Thanks for bringing it up. I guess it does fall unter the general category of stuff that worked beautifully in OS 9 but for which there is no really satisfactory anlog (at least yet) in OS X.

Good point about some of the OS X only apps. being more attractive than the OS itself.

Charles

Odyssey 363 - graphics and publishing software

From Ken. Cavaliere-Klick

Great article as always and right on the mark concerning graphics and publishing software. I would like to suggest that Adobe make PageMaker Elements to compliment PhotoShop Elements. I have enough experience to layout a single page of just about anything in PhotoShop Elements, it's just not as easy and precise as it would be in a basic DTP program. Adobe is not doing much of anything with PageMaker anyway, focusing their efforts on InDesign.

While Apple is focusing on the magical digital hub concept, which seems to be broadband internet oriented, they've completely lost focus on the desktop, where most of us work. The "i" stuff is cute. Apple needs to focus on getting this OS fine tuned. Impress us with the precision, not the eye candy, gimmicks and Internet stuff. Apple needs to fix and update AppleWorks NOW. Apple needs to make an "adult version" since AW6 seems to be focused on the under 6 set. Trying to layout anything remotely complex in AppleWorks is just not easy or accurate and often frustrating. The discussion boards have the same complaints echoing over and over.

My iBook is running Jaguar, my Bondi runs 9.2.2. I seem to be using my iBook for browsing and email and my Bondi for serious work. That's not right. I could run 9.2.2 on the iBook but that defeats the purpose of buying it in the first place. The iBook was supposed to be a step up, not sideways.

I'm still waiting for the one big, unique, thing that makes me think "wow".

Hi Ken;

You underscore the points I was trying to make.

Charles

Re: "Reasons For NOT Switching To OS X"

From Mike Wilson

Just a quick note about the other side of the story:

Back in the good old days, I did some work on early Macintoshes (I'm one of the guys who wrote Smalltalk/V for Mac), and in those days they were amazing. However, over the years, attempts to keep Mac OS alive in the face of changing processors, open architectures and multi-processing had left it both arcane and fragile. Things like manually partitioning the amount of memory an app used, conflicts between extensions, and all too frequent crashes were symptomatic of exactly how primitive the OS had become. Even *Microsoft* wised up enough to realize that it was time to build a stable, protected, secure OS before Apple did. (We can argue about whether they were successful, but they did *decide* they needed to make one first.)

In any case, I never considered purchasing a Mac of my own until OS X came out. Since then, I've bought two, and intend to buy a G5 when they become available. Probably more importantly, several (ok, well two anyway) of my PC hacker friends have also bought Macs now that they've seen mine and heard me talk about the capabilities of the OS. For me, Mac OS X is finally a modern OS with the same kind of sophistication that is found in Apple hardware.

Believe me, I understand why people who have stuck with Macs all this time are feeling the pain. Mac OS X is different; but it's different in a *good* way. The arguments you make for not switching all turn out to be equivalent to "but I'm comfortable where I am". If that's true, fine, but expect the rest of the world to move on. The future is OS X. It's time to switch.

McQ.

Hi Mike;

As I noted in the column, I *have* switched, and I'm not even considering switching back, partly because as a Mac writer, I have to keep the bleeding edge at least this side of the horizon, but I have come to quite like OS X too. I just don't think those who haven;t jumped on the bandwagon should be disparaged as stick-in-the-muds and luddites.

I don't disagree that OS 9 had reached the end of the road in terms of potential, but it is still a darned good operating system for many users' purposes, and its user interface is, IMHO, still the best that's ever been developed for personal computers.

Charles

Another reason for not switching

From Peter J. Pedersen

Dear Charles W. Moore,

You left one of the most important reasons for not switching out of your otherwise very succinct summary: OSX's significant decrease in UI usability vis-a-vis OS9.

While Jaguar patched most of the direct blunders in its predecessors, a significant UI elements lack both systemic consistency and intuitive logic (no, it is not an oxymoron...). Many have been mentioned here and in other fora, so I will just point out one: the Cocoa WP element for changing line height from fixed to flexible (found in nearly all Cocoa applications that have to do with text) is counter-intuitive in the extreme. Even seasoned DtP professionals (perhaps ESPECIALLY those) find it impossible to understand how it functions, and the deeply embarrassing (socalled) Help system offers none such. I have a list of over 50 such elemental faults, compiled last month during a 15 minutes break...

More importantly, the OSX UI contains a number of "white areas" when it comes to functionality. These are mainly due to the stubborn insistence of Tevanian et al to leave out vital elements of the OS9 user experience and attempt to replace (rather than enhance) it with the Dock. You know those elements by heart, of course. What we have seen from the Panther developments so far, Apple is aware of these deficiencies but continues to refuse to reintroduce them (except for the token, broken labels), choosing instead to reinvent the wheel (formed to a hardware-greedy balloon?). It is to be hoped that some kind of systemic UI coherency will gradually develop, but that seems doubtful given the total lack of fundamental UI research being made in the Apple skunkworks.

I'm not against OSX - but I am against choosing functionality and utility over novelty.

Regards, Peter J. Pedersen

Hi Peter;

I agree with you 100 percent. I'd like to see your list. ;-)

I did say that IMHO the Classic OS GUI is the best that's ever been developed for personal computers by a substantial margin.

Another thing I left out is OS X's utterly LAME input device support, not just that it won't support simultaneous multiple pointing device input the way OS 9 does, which is a relatively esoteric complaint although one that looms very large for me personally, but also the crankiness, imprecision, erratic response, need for double-pumping that is necessary in OS X even when you're using just one mouse in an enturely conventional manner.

Charles

Sir, Re OS9 BOOT, This Calls For An Open-source Challenge

From Julian Cox

Sir,

Reference your article:

http://www.applelinks.com/mooresviews/boot.shtml

I echo your views entirely. No dual boot = unacceptable kick in the stomach.

User interface issues aside (yes X is nice to look at) I have found fighting an X Box to get it to work just as painful as fighting a Windows 2000 box or anything else that has "no user-serviceable components inside".

Worse still, I have recently evangelised a good friend into switching from Windows to buying a new 17 inch flat-screen 1Ghz G4 iMac - only to find to my sheer embarrassment that I can't help him to get it to work because it won't boot in OS9 (I'll spare you the details because they are too painful to re-iterate). Basically if this is how I am to be repaid for my advocacy- thanks a bunch Apple!

But forget the rhetoric. I just need OS9 to boot properly on this thing - and on any subsequent piece of hardware I choose to buy for the forseeable future (or I won't buy it, plain and simple). Bottom line, If Apple won't help us, then can we arrange to help ourselves???

If you have a voice in the the formerly loyal Apple community can you please issue a call to arms to have some bright individuals figure out how to undo the damage and issue a Fix - to Un-Nix our new machines.

Thank you Julian Cox

Hi Julian;

I am of course in agreement, and I would live to see the opensourcers come up with a hack that would restore OS 9 bootability to newer Macs that are now bereft of same.

I marvel at how Apple can be so arrogantly oblivious to the fact that an awful lot of their loyal customers, even ones that prefer to use OS X most of the time, are simply not ready to cut all ties to OS 9. Personally, I just don;t want to use a machine that won;t boot OS 9, which was one reason I bought this iBook I'm working on right now when I did (viz: Apple's announcement last summer that OS 9 booting would be terminated in 01/03).

Charles

Why NOT switch?

From Bill Hornbuckle

I cannot agree with your maintenance assessment, and speculate that it might be you still have inadequate hardware (or maybe not). I have a TiBook 550 with 512MB RAM and other than fixing permissions after any installs and running MacJanitor every 2 weeks or so, I do almost nothing. Every once in a while I run fsck and it has yet to find anything. My TiBook runs flawlessly (10.2.6) and I crank it with Canvas, Photoshop, Deltagraph, Kaleidagraph, Mail, Address Book, Safari and most of the iApps (no iDVD) running at once; throw in MS Office, too. The one app that slows me down is Virtual PC, but I'm told it has a really high 'nice' value that allows it to dominate the CPU when it is running. I love OS X and would never go back. I should add that as a geophysicist at Shell I am experienced with UNIX and used to some of the paging angst that bothers some people. Paging in UNIX should not be considered a problem in the same way it is in other OSes.

Anyway, I find OSX to be remarkably trouble and maintenance free.

Bill Hornbuckle

Hi Bill;

Thanks for the report.

"Adequate hardware" means different things to different folks. I'm running OS 10,2,6 on a 700 MHz iBook with 640 MB RAM and 16 MB of VRAM, and a 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook with 640 MB of RAM and • MB of VRAM. It works better on the iBook, but the pageouts ( which I have come to the conclusion are, as you say, normal) do slow things down. At this writing I've had 66,614 in the three days since my last restart.

Part of what I was talking about is the necessity of repairing permissions and other stuff that Cocktail and MacJanitor take care of. With OS 9, I would go literally months between giving the system any maintenance attention.

Charles

I can't let Odyssey 363 go unchallenged

From Michael W Snider,

Charles, I can't let Odyssey 363 go unchallenged.

About the number of OS X users: it's 7+ million out of 25-30 million Mac Users. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of all Mac Users use Mac OS X. Of those that don't, given Apple's sales records for the last few years, almost all have to be using unsupported Macs or the first and second generation of supported machines. No one claims OS X is speedy on a 233 Mhz iMac, but almost everyone who can use OS X does..

You write:

"In my own OS X Odyssey I've discovered that OS X requires a lot more frequent maintenance and tinkering than OS 9 did. Helpful utilities like Cocktail and MacJanitor, et al. make this fairly easy, but I do miss the install-it-and-forget-it aspect of OS 9."

For the vast majority of OS X users, "install-it-and-forget-it" is the rule. Why didn't Conficlt Catcher survive? There's no need for it. I don't doubt you and your readers have problems, and, as you rightly pointed out in your reply to my last email, your job requires the installation of questionable software. But when you don't mess with OS X's system architecture, it works like a dream. And for most users, despite what you say below, productivity improves under OS X

"Despite some improvement with Jaguar, and reported substantial speed gains with Jaguar, OS X interface performance is still poky compared with OS 9, which runs like lightning on even moderately powerful Macs. As I've personally observed even with the relatively undemanding applications I use, one takes a significant productivity knock when switching to OS X. I don't doubt that it looms even larger for those who run more power-hungry applications."

You should doubt. Yeah, window resizing is a little slower in some apps, but on my 800 Mhz 17" iMac with 512 MB RAM I run two web servers (Apache and Radio) and I use the piggish Microsoft Office apps because of my job requirements. I also have running Mail, InterArchie, Appleworks, Quicktime Movie Player, Help Viewer, BBEdit, Tex-Edit, Thoth (Usenet reader), Graphic Converter, Melody Assistant (music composition software), iChat AV (no video, but sound), iTunes, Safari, Terminal, X11 with the Gimp (open source Photoshop-like app), iSync (with a Zire 71, my iDisk, and two other computers), iCal, iMovie, DVD Player, NoteTaker (check it out), SpellCatcher X, the Stone Studio apps (especially Create), OmniGraffle, the deveopment tools, emacs in a Terminal window, and of course all the Unix background activity, such as journaling and cron. They're not always active--I'm not perpetually compiling--but I never quit any of them except to play demanding games like Unreal Tournament or when I'm converting an iMovie project to CD-ROM format and I'm in a hurry. There's occasionally some effect on the GUI, but not enough to affect my work. Try that under OS 9 and see what happens to the memory requirements which you say are lower with OS 9. Think you could install that much memory? If you could, how much work would be lost when Office crashed and brought down every other app with it? Care to guess how background processes would run, if they weren't ill-behaved and stealing cycles?

I don't run my 600Mhz iBook so hard, mostly because the hard disk is slower, but there are 15 apps running on it right now.

" There seems to be a sizable consensus that while OS X is a cool OS for hobbyists and home computer users, when you really want to get your work done efficiently, it's still tough to beat OS 9."

You performance problems are yours. I'm not saying that as someone ignorant of the old system. I've used Mac OS since 1985, and I hate it on the rare occasions I have to launch Classic. Actually, I've removed Classic from the iBook, and the last time I used it on the iMac was to write and run a HyperCard script to export an old stack for use by NoteTaker. Classic will soon be gone there, too.

"I have long argued that despite Apple's anxiety about getting users to upgrade to OS X, putting the proverbial gun to their heads by arbitrarily terminating OS 9 boot capability was counterproductive. Apple has backtracked substantially from the plan announced last September to end OS 9 booting by January, 2003. New iBooks, Titanium PowerBooks, eMacs, and G4 towers can all still boot into OS 9. However, the bad taste of threatened coercion lingers, and for many the iMacs' and AlBooks' inability to boot into Classic is an annoyance and an inconvenience for a varity of reasons, even for those who would have run mainly in OS X anyway."

It's not an arbitrary Apple, but rather economics and engineering doing the forcing. Nor has Apple backtracked: no new designs boot into OS 9. There never was a bad taste for people who've done hardware/software development. Apple had no choice.

Anyway, peace be with you, Charles. Michael

Hi Michael;

Thanks for sharing your views. Just a couple of comments.

I run suites of the same or equivalent applications in OS X and OS 9. For example respectively native versions of Tex Edit Plus, Mozills, iCab, iListen, NotePad Deluxe, Nisus Email, Eudora, POPMonitor, and so on. I usually have between 15 and 25 applications and utilities open. In OS 9 I've never even come close to using up the 640 MB of RAM in my Pismo, and I rarely hit the ceiling with the 192 MB of RAM in my former WallStreet. In OS X I max out the 640 MB withib a day of startup, at which point the pageouts commence and things slow down. This happens on both the Pismo and the iBook. As Bill noted above, this is apparently normal for UNIXs but no similar phenomenon happens in OS 9.

I also very rarely find myself waiting for the OS to catch up in OS 9. Happens continuously in OS X -- not so much long waits, but an accretion of momentary lags that punctuate the workflow and cumulatively slow things down, which diminishes productivity. Whenever I boot back into OS 9 for something or other, I immediately am struck by the way everything happens *right now.* It's refreshing.

Just to clarify, I have no quarrel with Apple not offering OS 9 bootability on completely new engineering. I wouldn't expect it in the G5s for example. I do protest arbitrary firmware blocks, however. I understand that there is no engineering impediment to the recent flat-panel iMacs booting OS X. The capability has apparently been deliberately blocked.

Charles

One further note...

From Michael Snider

Charles,

The MacFixit folks have added a comment on the article that prompted your Odyssey 363 on switching from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. There are two especially interesting passages:

"We use Mac OS X exclusively at MacFixIt, booting into Mac OS 9 only for internal product testing, as well as reproduction of reported Classic Mac OS bugs. We love the way Mac OS X runs on every system in the office, from a 400 MHz Pismo PowerBook G3 to a 17" PowerBook G4. We made the Mac OS X transition immediately and enjoyed a heightened sense of stability and overall reliability instantly."

"a large portion of our readership still actively uses Mac OS 9. We know this from server statistics, but more importantly from the relatively significant share of bug reports that originate from users in OS 9."

So from the beginning, "instantly," the long-time pre OS X Mac troubleshooting experts found Mac OS X more stable and reliable. In a high-volume production shop, they "love" the way Mac OS X runs even on a 400 MHZ Pismo. And they know people are using Mac OS 9 partly because of the "relatively significant share of bug reports" from that system.

For good reasons, you have a very unusual, perhaps unique, hardware setup, and you modify core system functionality with 3rd party apps. Your experience is not and cannot be typical. Please don't describe it as if it were. I guess you can tell I'm a little exasperated with your description of Mac OS X's performance and usability.

Peace nevertheless, Michael

Hi Michael;

I can't speak for the MacFixIt folks, nor can they speak for me. However, a great many other OS X users have made observations similar to mine on speed, Finder sluggishness and maintenance issues, et al. See some of the letters on this page, for example.

I also beg to differ that my OS X setup is that unusual, although my array of input devices indubitably is. However the latter should not affect system performance.

I actually don't have a whole lot of third party system tweaking software installed. I test many applications and utilities, but the vast majority are uninstalled after testing. For the record, the only third party items that show up in my System Preferences window are Unsanity's APE manager, MouseZoom (which gooses OS X's lazy mouse tracking), and WindowShade X. (MaxiMice is also there, but it's turned off). I doubt that very many post-novice OS X users run dead stock systems.

My comments in Odessey 363 were explicitly comparing OS X performance to OS 9 performance. I use both systems for exactly the same tasks, with equivalent software, on the same computers. OS X has many virtues, but in terms of speed, polished performance, and maintenance/resource requirements, OS 9 still has it licked by a substantial margin -- I repeat in direct comparison, using it the same way on the same machines.

Charles

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

CM

Charles W. Moore