Happy Birthday Mac OS X! It’s been five wonderful years since OS X was first released, and it’s truly risen to be one of the best, most secure, easy to use, and well designed operating systems in the world. No diss to my friends at Microsoft, but OS X really does take the cake for being an attractive and complete operating system that’s easy to work with, easy to tweak, easy to install, and easy to troubleshoot. Great work from the dev at Apple, and here’s to many more birthdays to come!
Hot on the heels of this momentous event is going to be Apple’s 30th anniversary, but we’ll get to that when it happens. Right now we have a very nice article from Ars Technica about the 5 year journey and what it meant for Apple, the horrible death spiral that the company was in prior to Mac OS X, and the continued slow and painful death that Mac OS 9 seems to keep going through-seriously guys, let OS 9 go. It’s okay. It can die now. The author of the piece, John Siracusa, has written about the Macintosh for a long while now, and has plenty to say about it, from where the OS came from to where it is today. It’s a fitting homage and is very honest, and worth reading. Allow me an excerpt from Siracusa’s piece:
I see a lot more Mac users today than I ever saw in the pre-Mac OS X era, but few of them remember what it was like in the beginning. They’ve never argued with someone who’s insisted that “only toy computers have a mouse.” They didn’t spend years trying to figure out why the world stuck with MS-DOS while they were literally living in the future. They never played the maze. (Dagnabbit!)
Today’s Mac users appreciate the refinement, the elegance, the nuances of Mac OS X. Today, the Mac grows on people. It seeps into their consciousness until they either break down and buy one or retreat to familiarity, perhaps to be tempted again later.
The original Mac users had a very different experience. Back then, the Mac wasn’t a seductive whisper; it was a bolt of lightning, a wake-up call, a goddamn slap in the face. “Holy crap! This is it!” Like I said, transformative. For the rest of the computing world, that revelatory moment was paced out over an entire decade. The experience was diluted, and the people were transformed slowly, imperceptibly.
I couldn’t agree more. Read the whole article below: