OS X Curmudgeon? Me? Not By Design Or Intent
And as I expressed my growing misgivings and frustrations 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 hated OS X. Neither has been true from the beginning. I consider myself to be a Mac fanboy.
Apparently the rep. I picked up as an OS X curmudgeon is still with me. In a column this week, referencing OS X Odyssey 915 in which I noted that I hadn't been complaining as much about OS X 10.5 Leopard since installing the version 10.5.2 update and Leopard Graphics Updater last month, the Mac Night Owl's Gene Steinberg observed:
"After reading a story from a certain Mac commentator who has encountered an endless odyssey migrating to Mac OS X, I stopped and wondered. If Charles Moore reports a far more pleasant experience, I should think most everyone out there will or should have good things to say about Leopard."
Well, that's mostly fair comment, but my riposte would be that the OS X Odyssey is "endless" because the OS continues to evolve. I've long since migrated to OS X, and the last time I used Mac OS Classic for front line production work (except for using a few Classic applications in OS X Classic Mode), was back in early 2004. There are still some things I miss about Mac OS Classic, the speed for one thing, and Finder response (partly an ineffable sense of "feel") has yet to be matched by any OS X version, but it's many years since I've considered OS 9 to be a serious alternative to OS X as a production system. Preemptive multitasking makes up for a lot. In fact, I've pretty solidly migrated to Leopard on my number one Mac, but it's been a challenge to use through its first three - four months as the Mac OS top cat.
Looking back, just when OS 10.3 Panther had finally settled in as a reliable and relatively bug-free tool, along came OS 10.4 Tiger and a whole new process of orientation and bug patching. The happy note there was that Tiger was a lot less buggy from the get-go than Panther had been, and Apple stuck with it for longer. I didn't consider Panther a really satisfactory and stable OS until about the version 10.3.7 update. while Tiger hit its stride at about version 10.4.5.
Consequently, it was a disappointment when, unlike every successive version number upgrade of OS X from the beginning, Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, despite (or perhaos because of) its enhanced feature set, proved to be a substantial step backward in terms of functional refinement and stability, although, as I mentioned in the referenced column, it has improved substantially with the latest update and I imagine it will be progressively more refined with version 10.5.3 and subsequent updates.
Meanwhile, the OS X Tiger system at version 10.4.11 is a truly solid rock of dependability, at least on my machines. I'm still running it as a production OS on my two Pismo PowerBooks and my wife's 700 MHz G3 iBook is also performing great under OS 10,4.11.
Indeed, my older Pismo, which gets two or three hours of use daily as a composing, editing, and Web-surfing/posting platform, hasn't been rebooted since sometime in early January, and I just realized that my wife's iBook hasn't been restarted since I installed the OS 10.4.11 update on it around the same time - another machine in daily use. That's more than decent stability.
My old Pismo, with a 550 MHz G4 processor upgrade and a 5400 RPM, 40 gigabyte hard drive, but only a measly 578 megabytes of RAM (in unpaired modules) still manages to work really well in OS 10.4.11 despite being pushed hard with Classic Mode and a bunch of applications and browsers running. Tiger on that machine is pretty much all one could reasonably ask for in a reliable, smooth-working operating system, and I'm delighted to give it and Apple's software engineers full credit for a job well done.
However, and I have a low patience threshold for hassle and bugginess, and don't hesitate to criticize when a tool - hardware or software - falls short of my demanding standards in that context. My ideal is for the platform - computer and operating system - to intrude as little as possible in my work flow, and generally speaking, the Mac OS is about as good as it gets on that score, although some versions and, combinations have been a lot better than others. It's all relative of course, and I just shake my head in mystification and wonderment at what Windows-users put up with on a routine basis. I suppose if I had to I would grit my teeth and deal, but I don't have to, thanks to the Mac OS, and I'm appreciative of that.
For example, the ApplePeels blogger has been struggling with Windows Vista for the past five months, and notes that there are 10 things (at least) that would need fixing in order for Vista to become an acceptable platform, including:
• It is slow, and there seems to be no way around it.
• It takes forever to boot and to shut down.
• Waking a Vista machine from sleep is liking playing Russian roulette, you do not know what is going to happen, but there is a good chance it will be something bad.
• Wireless connectivity continues to be undependable.
• The applications do not seem to play well together. I have a lot of trouble with Outlook. It stops responding at least once a day.
• Vista seems to be very inefficient in its use of resources. I can run far more applications on my MacBook which has less memory and barely enough hard drive space left to function.
• I cannot count on the system. When crunch time comes, something seems to go wrong.
• Battery life is terrible.
• I do not mind being asked if it is okay to do something, but most of the time the question is incomprehensible.
• Having to reboot a system a couple of times a day is inexcusable this far into the computer revolution.
Arrrgh! No wonder people are downgrading to Windows XP in despair. Life is too short to waste time and energy coping with all the crap Microsoft and Windows throw at you when OS X is around as an alternative, and even relatively buggy Leopard still offers a vastly superior experience, for the reasons outlined in the previous paragraphs and more. I resent being obliged to reboot once a week or so with OS X (somewhat more often with Leopard thanks to the Spaces bug).
But Leopard's still well shy of perfection, and as I said, it's been a disappointment to have to take such a big step backward in the progress for from the Tiger's stellar dependability. This week Macworld's Dan Frakes posted a column summarizing his first four months on Leopard, noting that:
"Leopard is the first version of Mac OS X that has been less stable than the previous one for me - to various degrees depending on the Mac. Up until Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), each major new version - 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 - has been considerably better than the one before it: fewer application crashes, less-frequent system freezes, and better memory management. But my Mac Pro has had more kernel panics in the past month than it had in a year and half under Tiger, and I experience, on all my Macs, application crashes a bit more regularly under 10.5 than I did under 10.4."
Wow; Dan is being awfully kind, given that degree of instability he's confronted with. Some folks have a higher tolerance for bugginess than I do I guess. I mean, I've never had a kernel panic yet with Leopard (and have had precious few with Tiger on any of my machines over the past three years), and I rarely experience application crashes. Dan also says he only occasionally uses Spaces, "not because the concept is bad... but rather because Spaces has numerous minor glitches that, taken together, make it too frustrating for me." Ouch! Spaces is probably my favorite feature unique to Leopard, but I concur that it's dreadfully buggy, and thus the genesis of much of my Leopard frustration, but I'm addicted to it.
Gene Steinberg criticizes "a few complainers... apparently hanging out over at MacFixIt, reporting absolutely bizarre troubles with everything Apple builds. Alas, this venerable Mac troubleshooting site, originally founded by the estimable Ted Landau years ago, is rapidly ditching responsibility, and spending more time regurgitating content rather than investigating these reports."
Well, in defense of MacFixIt, as they observed themselves a while back, the site isn't called "Mac Hunkey-Dory." I don't think that the people who report these problems are making them up, or have an anti-Apple chip on their shoulders. They just want their computers to work properly. I've had some troubles over the years that seemed bizarre, but they were still troubling, and I've found MacFixIt a very useful resource in finding solutions to some of them.
On my own OS X Odyssey, I didn't consider either OS 10.1 Puma or OS 10.2 Jaguar to be up to the standard of work efficiency set by Classic Mac OS 9.2.2, which was a very mature and solid performer in its last iteration. I one time went more than three months without a restart on my old 233 MHZ WallStreet PowerBook using 9.2.2 for the same sort of the workaday duty being served by the tweaked Pismo running OS 10.4.11 today. The tipping point for me came with the release OS 10.3 Panther ain the fall of 2003, at which juncture the stability and multitasking advantages of OS X began to outweigh the sheer speed, Finder-friendliness, and flexibility of OS 9.2.2. Panther was still a pretty buggy kitty through its first five or six updates, but by the end of its development had been transformed into the best iteration of the Mac OS up to that time, and TIger was an improvement on it.
Everybody's computing experience is somewhat different due to the infinite variety of hardware/software, combinations, tasking, personal temperament and taste, level of care they take in configuration and maintenance, and so forth. One qualification I've always endeavored to emphasize in my OS X Odyssey commentary over the years is that I've never been running X on anything close to cutting-edge hardware, which no doubt impacts my perspective somewhat. Philosophically and temperamentally, I'm a low-ender, and with computers, as well as automobiles, I prefer to be using most of the performance a lower-powered machine has to offer rather than idling along taxing only a fraction of what a powerhouse is capable of.
On the other hand, I've always been well above the official support threshold with all the Mac OS as versions are used, so I think I should be able to expect decent and efficient, if not necessarily scintillatingly fast performance, and that's exactly what I'm getting, for example, with OS 10.4.11 Tiger on the G4 Pismo and G3 iBook.
The minimum supported hardware for Leopard is an 867 MHz G4. The Mac I have been running Leopard on for the past three+ months is a 1.33 GHz G4 with 1.5 gigabytes of RAM and a Radeon 9600 GPU with 64 megabytes of video RAM - well above the basement hardware spec. I'm actually quite satisfied with the speed I'm getting; it's the crankiness and bugginess that bugs me, the absolutely abominable POP3 and SMTP email throughput, and Spaces (a feature I just love in principle) crapping out and requiring a system reboot to restore proper behavior to cite my two biggest beefs now that Stacks has been sort of fixed with the OS 10.5.2 update.
That said, I'm now too hooked on several Leopard-only features to switch back to Tiger for my main production platform (I still have 10.4.11 installed on a second partition if I wanted to do that). Spaces, TIme Machine, Quick Look, the enhanced power and features of Leopard Preview and Text Edit, and more, make it worth the aggravation of putting up with OS 10.5's angularities, I think. Now, if you'll excuse me; I have to reboot - Spaces just crapped out again.....
Charles W. Moore
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