As I slid the tray back into the PowerBook G3, the cold wind of reality blew across my thoughts. I have been waiting for a new Apple OS since the first early promises eight years ago. Eight years of pent-up anticipation was about to be set free. However, after a few days of poking around, Mac OS X comes very close. The first thing that grabbed my attention was the spectacular visual presentation.
Polished touches lurk everywhere.
Programs still crash. I was able to get QuickTime to hang on a couple of occasions, but all I had to do was kill the process and restart it, a task that only took a few seconds. The surface is shiny and beautiful, and the core is rock solid. It is as if Apple built Mac OS X like a software version of the Chunnel, with two teams working from different directions that meet in the middle. And it is Mac OS X's midsection that feels the most unfinished.