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17" eMac for $799 |
Posted on 10/28/2003 6:03:26 PM PST by Vermonter
After God casually looked up from His desk, glanced at the Cubs and the Red Sox and cleared His throat in a meaningful sort of way before returning to His paperwork, the phenomenon wherein hordes of amped-up souls gleefully line up at all hours to buy something the moment it becomes available retreated to its natural arenas: the next "Lord of the Rings" movie and Panther, Apple's latest major update to Mac OS X.
Yes, people were lined up for Panther. Apple kept its retail stores open until midnight on Friday to accommodate everyone who couldn't contain themselves. Mac users are that kind of people, and Panther (Mac OS X 10.3, if you insist on being boring) is that kind of release.
The most obvious changes are those made to the Finder, Mac OS's utility for navigating, managing and opening files, folders and applications. What made Apple decide that this critical, central app needed to be re-made in the iTunes' metallic image apps? Tequila? Did a faulty thermostat in the office fridge cause the OS team to unknowingly ingest spoiled dairy products over a prolonged period?
Whatever the cause, after spending one entire workday with the metal Finder I'm ready to say that it's the first big mistake Apple's made in Mac OS X's three-year history. The Finder feels clumsy. The basic iTunes interface (in which the left side of a window contains a sidebar of resources and the right side contains items that those resources can act upon) doesn't translate well and no matter how I customize a Finder window, there's still an immense amount of wasted space.
This same basic scheme has been applied to the standard navigation pane that drops down whenever an application saves or opens a document. But here, it's a big improvement on 10.2; opening a file on a server half a world away is as quick and easy as getting it from your Documents folder.
Onward. As a part-time Windows user, I need to make a plea to Microsoft: swipe Expose, Panther's new window manager. Don't even bother being coy. Just throw a concrete block through the glass, grab it, and don't stop running until you get back to Redmond.
Navigating through stacks and stacks of open windows is a nightmare, in Windows as well as Mac OS 10.2. But with Panther, you just hit a key and suddenly, your desktop animates into a screen-filling collage that displays miniatures of every open window and tool palette, with no overlaps. Click on the window you want to work with and the screen obediently reshuffles itself to bring that window to the front.
And each miniature window is "live." If it contains a movie, it'll continue to play. If it contains a Web page, it'll continue to update. Expose is more than a trick for selecting a window: it's one of the Mac's best user-interface refinements of all-time. Steal! This! Idea!
In addition to countless little tweaks to familiar operations, many of OS X's built-apps have been seriously overhauled. I'll single out Panther's new DVD Player: Apple's taken an embarrassingly shabby player and turned it into one of the very best.
Now let's get to the dull stuff. Apple continues to improve Mac OS X's compatibility with Windows networks and resources. Panther adds support of Active Directory and Kerberos authentication. Its mail and address book integrate with Microsoft Exchange servers, and users can exploit Windows-based file servers more fully.
Yet Apple steams ahead in its support of open computing. An X11 server is now built in, which vastly simplifies running open-source Unix apps, like OpenOffice.org.
Not every Mac user is the sort who'd giddily wait in line to buy Apple's latest OS the instant it becomes available, largely sight-unseen. Not for $129, anyway. But Panther delivers considerable and assertive bang for the buck, tempting the sensible wheat side of you that wants new, useful features as well as the sugar-frosted side that wants everything to be fast, easy and cool. It's compelling; it will easily become the Mac's de facto OS by the end of the year.
The next big rev of Windows is still a long ways off. Yet I have no earthly idea if in 2005 they'll be able to produce an OS to match the one that Apple had in 2003.
Andy Ihnatko writes on computer issues for the Sun-Times.
Nah, I'm part of that 10 percent that NEVER gets the word.
$799---including monitor, modem, Ethernet, DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive---is too expensive? That amount of money would buy a pretty weak PC, too.
Oh, you meant desktop....Well, Apple might want to consider porting to x86 or IA 64. I can't think of too many Fortune 500's that would ditch 100K+ in Intel based desktop's for PowerPC's. Nice chip (I love RISC), no where near able to compete (dollar for dollar) against the cheaper Intel's and AMD's.
(I assume it's IDE, but what rpm?)
Scientists are just jumping on the Mac bandwagon. A workstation that does native Microsoft Word, computations and data reduction as a Unix, and you can integrate it in a Windows environment, as well as in a Unix environment. And for the most part, it does it out of the box. That's some powerful mojo. That's why I'm using a mac right now, anyway.
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