Here's to the crazy ones: a decade of Mac OS X reviews


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Here's to the crazy ones: a decade of Mac OS X reviews

Ars Technica's John Siracusa looks back with a decade's hindsight at his early reviews of Mac OS X. He talks about what went right, what went wrong, and what he's still waiting on.

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The latter half of the 1990s was a dark time for the company then known as Apple Computer, Inc. Windows 95 had dashed any remaining hopes of mass-market desktop dominance for Apple. The big profits of the earlier part of the decade had given way to some huge annual losses. The future of the entire company was in doubt.

Like injured animals, corporations are adept at hiding the true magnitude of their injuries. As grim as things appeared from the outside, few Apple enthusiasts knew at the time just how close the company came to fiscal ruin. But the software picture was always crystal-clear?clear, and terrifying.

The Mac operating system lacked two important features essential to remaining competitive past the end of the decade: memory protection and preemptive multitasking. Over the course of many years, Apple made several abortive attempts to create a modern successor to the classic Mac operating system, all of which crashed and burned before the horrified eyes of Mac fans everywhere. Regardless of its financial issues, it was clear to the geeks that Apple was on the road to technological ruin.

Apple made its final play for salvation in 1997 when it purchased NeXT and, after a one more false start, announced at WWDC 1998 what would be, blessedly, its last next-generation operating system strategy: Mac OS X.

By all rights, the Mac faithful should have been, if not ecstatic, then at the very least relieved at this turn of events. Finally, a modern operating system for the Mac. But there was another, equally common reaction: fear. As a body of code, Mac OS X was not an evolution or enhancement of the Mac operating system that we knew and loved. It was an entirely different?albeit not exactly new?operating system to which the Mac name and, presumably, user experience were to be retroactively applied.

Fear of just how badly this undertaking could turn out is a big part of what motivated me to not only learn as much as I could about the future of Mac OS, but also to write about it. As a freshly-minted Unix nerd, I couldn't help but be somewhat excited at the marriage of my two favorite operating systems. But laid over that optimism was a blanket of mild hysteria regarding every part of the project above the core OS.

Now here we are, a decade later, and Mac OS X has matured into a fine product. This ten-year marker presents an opportunity to do something technology writers usually avoid. I'm going to look back at some of my hopes and fears from the early days of Mac OS X's development and compare them to the reality of today. Was I right on the money, shrewdly warning of future disasters that did, in fact, come to pass? Or do my predictions now read more like the ravings of a gray-bearded lunatic? It's judgment day.

Read the full article on Ars Technica (long read, but worth it).

It goes to show how far Mac OS X has come in the past 10 years.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've always liked Ars Technica's reviews on Mac OS X editions, especially the early releases like 10.0 and 10.1. Really shows you how far the OS has come. It went from being nearly unusable for practically the first year to being the matured product it is today.

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