Apple has now decided to kill its plans for the much delayed, massive operating-system overhaul that was last expected to ship next summer. Instead, the company will roll out smaller updates to the Mac OS at six-month intervals. This is a G ood T hing. There's a stigma attached to Copland left over from years of mismanagement that the new regime now leaves behind. For instance, look at the phenomenal growth of the Internet.
Customers now expect more-savvy networking and Internet access from their computers.
But Copland was started well before the Internet boom and would have to have been significantly overhauled to really integrate the Net. Customers want and need preemptive multitasking and protected memory. But because these considerably more complex OS technologies have been components of Copland, other, less complex but equally important parts have had to wait. For example, two and a half years after the first PowerPC-based Macs shipped, the Mac OS is still largely 680x0 code, slowing everything down. Critical bottlenecks, such as the File Manager, are still not PowerPC-native, because those components have been waiting for the rest of Copland to happen.