Cool Mac Gear

For the past four months, I’ve been writing about my adventures learning Mac OS X in the OS X Odyssey series of columns here on Applelinks, and I’ve had a lot of help in the form of letters from readers, some of whom are enthusiastic fans of Apple’s new operating system, and others who, like myself, are finding warming up to OS X a bit of a challenge.

I have no quarrel with people who love OS X. I’m generally genuinely happy for them, and given that Apple’s future is now predicated on the success of the new operating system, delighted that people like it. Indeed, my son has been an enthusiastic OS X fan since he got hold of a bootleg copy of one of the pre-public betas (don’t ask), and has used it as his working system since early 2000.

Unfortunately, he, like quite a few other OS X enthusiasts, also soon adopted the attitude that the legacy of Mac OS was not worth bothering with any more; something to be discarded like yesterday’s newspaper; indeed that it had become almost a sort of embarrassment.

I find this way of thinking difficult to understand, especially in someone who was for years a consummate Mac OS X aficionado and advocate. How can it be that something that one so short a time ago was so passionately enthusiastic about, now can be treated almost with contempt? It puzzles me.

It was the legacy Mac OS that really got me interested in computers. I’m not a tech-buff by nature, and I’ve really never been attracted to the nuts and bolts, the under-the-hood aspects of computing. I’m moderately competent in dealing with hardware at the removing and replacing stuff inside level, but I’m an electronics dunce, and not much better when it comes to programming code issues. No, it was the OS -- specifically the Macintosh GUI -- that got me on board and made me an enthusiast.

And if you’ve been a Mac fan who for more than a year or so, it was presumably the legacy Mac OS that attracted you. Apple hardware has more often than not been pretty cool, but if it just ran Windows, I don’t think it could ever have inspired us the way the Macintosh experience has.

I am also a person who values loyalty and who believes that you should dance with the one that brung ya’, which is why I’m finding the fickle dismissal of a legacy Mac OS, not only by so many OS X devotee-users, but indeed by Apple itself, tough to fathom and more than a little dismaying.

Two years ago, Apple was touting OS 9 as “like getting a new computer for $99.” Today it’s being treated like a poor relation.

Now, while I’m never one to embrace anything simply because it’s the latest and newest big thing, I’m also not the sort that arbitrarily picks a particular point in the evolution of technology and refuses to advance beyond it. So while I currently maintain that OS 9 is still a better work platform for me, and for quite a few other folks who push their Macs hard doing certain types of work, I fully acknowledge that this will not be the case forever.

OS X will get better, while OS 9 development, aside from tweaks now and then to maintain and improve compatibility in OS X’s Classic emulation mode, is essentially frozen at a 1999/Y2K stage of development. It will run remain a useful operating system for many years to come, but eventually continuing to use it will amount to the same sort of harmless eccentricity that doggedly sticking with the Apple II or DOS, or Amiga, seems like today. There’s nothing wrong with doing that if it makes you happy, but you’re letting the world of innovation pass you by.

However, we’re not nearly at that point yet with Mac OS 9, which will still run happily on the very latest, bleeding-edge Macs, and in many respects run more efficiently, quickly, and predictably than OS X will at its present stage of development. Observing this is a simple statement of empirical fact. I can get my work done more quickly, smoothly, and efficiently in OS 9 than I can in OS X. This may not be true for some other users doing other types of work, but it is emphatically so for me. Which does nothing to diminish my enthusiasm for OS 9, while still appreciating the strong points, and especially the potential of OS X.

The way I see it, this is not a zero sum game. Continuing to love the legacy Mac OS takes nothing away from OS X. We now have not one, but two, superior Mac OSs to choose from, with the older one thrown in as a free bonus, no less. So why the contempt, even hostility, toward OS 9, and in some instances toward people who continue to like and use it?

osOpinion.com’s John Holmes thinks he knows why. In a column posted last June, Holmes wrote:

Well, I have an emotional attachment to the legacy Mac OS, and I’m not in the least ashamed of it. I have always been bemused by the assertion that passionate advocacy of anything blows one’s credibility.

Some of us tend to think intuitively, while others, who consider themselves hard-nosed rationalists, distrust and scorn intuition as a tool in forming opinions and positions, and routinely dispel appeals to intuition as “emotional” arguments that in their estimation not only carry no persuasive weight, but which actually discredit any objective substance as might inhere in the position advocated.

Personally, I tend to be distrustful and suspicious of by positions formulated with total dispassion, much less detached irony; or to put it another way, I tend to give gut intuition a great deal more credence than some people do.

This is not to say that I dismiss or disparage factual reasoning and logical constructs, but I regard them as only constituting a partial analysis of any issue at best. One considers and weighs the facts to the limited degree they can be discerned in any situation, but to esteem only empirically proven knowledge results in a partial and stunted worldview to my way of thinking.

As philosopher Richard Weaver observed, “The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.” This was something Weaver regarded as an unfortunate development. Me too.

Mac folks have traditionally invoked the term “elegance” when describing why they prefer the Macintosh. Impressive hardware specs may inspire admiration, but elegance inspires passion.

As “Dr. Mac” -- Bob LeVitus -- once observed: “Mac people are just cooler. Mac users have a soul. People don’t tell you ‘I love my Dell’ or ‘I love Windows.’ But you hear people say ‘I love my Mac’ all the time.” However, as John Holmes noted, in the eyes of many OS X advocates, that sort of affirmation is just mawkish and embarrassing emotionalism.

Writing in the February 1999 Atlantic Monthly, in an article entitled “Who Owns Intelligence?” Harvard School of education professorHoward Gardner notes that “I have concluded that all human beings possess at least eight intelligences: linguistic and logical-mathematical (the two most prized in school and the ones central to success on standard intelligence tests), musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal....

“We all possess these eight intelligences -- and possibly more.”

However, says Gardner, “Owing to the accidents of heredity, environment, and their interactions, no two of us exhibit the same intelligences in precisely the same proportions. Our “profiles of intelligence” differ from one another.”

Unfortunately, as Prof. Gardner observes, in our culture some of the intelligences tend to be esteemed more highly than others, and the last six of Gardner’s eight intelligences -- the ones that might manifest in passion and emotion, are regarded as less “serious” than linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence.

And I agree with John Holmes that a discounting of passion will ultimately backfire on the Macintosh community.

A postscript. By coincidence, I was talking with my son on the telephone last night after drafting the first three-quarters of this article. He’s doing telephone tech support for Windows XP these days in the employ of a Microsoft subcontractor, and had finished his shift yesterday with a four-hour call from a Sony Vaio user in Nevada, who, like nearly every client he counsels, was having trouble getting XP to work on her machine.Ê

Actually, he concedes that XP is not a bad OS once you get it set up, and his Pentium 4 2GB workstation is lightning-fast, but the configuration and troubleshooting hassles with Windows are still horrific. “Windows is really horrible when things go wrong.” he observed.Ê

One of the XP issues he finds especially frustrating is that while Windows will now boot from a CD, you still have no access to the Finder or your hard drive, and with all but a vestigial skeleton of DOS removed from XP, you don’t even have that to fall back on when trouble strikes.Ê

“ So OS X gives you a lot more flexibility in control with its Unix command line facility,” I observed. “Yes,” he replied, “ but you can’t access your files when booted from the OS X install CD either. “However, the really cool thing about OSX is that you still have OS 9 available in emergencies, allowing you to get at your files and to really control your computer from the GUI. One thing this job working with XP has made me appreciate, is just how good the old Mac OS really is.”

Say what? Passion lives!

Amen and hallelujah!

Charles W. Moore