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. At first, this flabby middle troubled me.