Hardware is also problematic - although Mac OS X has support for some peripherals and expansion cards, using other pieces of hardware may require the user to reboot in Mac OS 9.1. I don't mean to imply Apple should have delayed Mac OS X's release. It's important for Apple to make good on its promises, show that Mac OS X is real, and give early adopters a chance to gain experience before exposing Mac OS X to the masses via new Macs. To get back to our conundrum of what to write about the Mac's new operating system, we decided to look at just who should buy and install Mac OS X, along with the related question of who should avoid it for the near future. We plan to have more detailed looks at different aspects of Mac OS X itself in future issues, but we feel it's most important right now to help people decide if they should make the jump immediately.
Few upgrades are so forgiving of the past.
Let's start on a positive note and look at who definitely should install Mac OS X, preferably soon. The two groups at the head of the line are developers and anyone in tech support, since knowledge of Mac OS X for them is paramount. And of course, anyone who has a G3-based Mac with 128 MB of RAM and sufficient curiosity can install Mac OS X without committing to a permanent migration. Noting that developers should be among the first to switch to Mac OS X feels obvious, but it's still worth mentioning. I also believe developers should be seeing what it's like to use Mac OS X in the real world, since that's the only way to understand what customers will experience.