For years, the hit television series Moonlighting survived off the growing chemistry of its lead characters Maddie and David (portrayed respectively by Cybill Shepard and Bruce Willis). Fans clamored for the bickering pair to get together. But after the duo consummated their hitherto working relationship (off camera, of course), viewers quickly grew weary of the match — and the show.
Apple Macintosh users — now eyeballing the Mac OS X upgrade — can appreciate that piece of television history. They understand that anticipation and its aftermath are a complex muddle of conflicting emotions. After all, Mac fans have been waiting for years for a modern operating system, and have watched its glacial progress at event keynote sessions and through the concluding round of beta versions. It has grown in our imaginations to the point where we looked forward to the thrill of running OS X on our Macs and snapping our fingers under the noses of those non-believing, smug Windows users. Finally, it’s here in all its modern goodness.
Yet, at the same time, we’re apprehensive — and for good reason, because our experience tells us that even an ordinary software upgrade saps time — to install, to familiarize ourselves with its new features, to update favorite applications. And OS X is the mother of all upgrades (despite its male-chromosome reference): It changes everything about the Mac, from the lowest-level interaction with hardware to the desktop interface. The new look and feel is familiar enough to be reassuring to longtime Mac users, but everything under the hood revolves around a Unix kernel — the mother tongue of the supergeek nation. In other words, this upgrade looks to be a super time sink. (Readers running Windows 98 and 2000 systems shouldn’t be smug. According to industry insiders, Windows XP will bring its own share of incompatibilities. For example, it will reportedly drop some support for the Plug and Play standard.)
The upgrade to OS X is seemingly daunting even to those well up on the digital food chain. I recently spoke to several resellers who specialize in servicing content creators. All said they were attempting (albeit with only marginal success) to steer customers away from Mac OS X, despite their deep ties to Apple and the Mac platform. The reason? Certainly, the best content-creation solutions they have to offer at this time are designed around Mac OS 9.x (for some it’s Mac OS 8.6). Even more, the resellers want to avoid an added load of profit-sucking tech support calls — particularly about a product they are still poorly prepared to support.
A Rocky Relationship
The decision to change should hinge on productivity — or its lack thereof. Perhaps by their natures, longtime Mac users in the content-creation business may have some difficulty figuring the total return on investment (ROI) for the OS X upgrade. The bottom line is that upgrading to OS X will involve a considerable investment. The investment in time should include the hours spent learning something new and shaking out the initial bugs of an installation. You’d also need to factor in the usual crop of incompatibilities that follow an installation and the considerable time consumed downloading the necessary patches, drivers, and updates.
This entire upgrade expense should be considered a separate investment that will result in some future return. Its total price tag comprises the hours needed for this process, the actual out-of-pocket cost for software updates, and depending on the Mac setup, even hardware upgrades.
Currently, the majority of any investment in OS X will be confined to the OS itself, since we’re still waiting for native versions of most content-creation platform apps. But Adobe teased attendees of the recent Seybold show with a look at a forthcoming OS X-compatible version of InDesign. FreeHand users interested in making the OS X switch can rest comfortably knowing that FreeHand 10 supports the OS as a native app.
My bet is that most readers would find a major move to OS X too costly at this time if they judged it purely on the basis of ROI. Given that OS X overturns almost every hard-won trick and understanding of the platform, the smart move is to leverage for as long as possible your existing investments in a stable workflow and Mac OS knowledge.
Once in a Blue Moon
Still, Mac OS X is a significant event to the avid Mac community, and the urge to upgrade the latest, greatest thing can be difficult to resist. It’s a primal impulse to Mac fans: Must run OS X! Ignoring its dearth of native applications, its often-slow performance, and hazy details about important technologies such as scripting, fonts, and rendering, exploring OS X is just plain fun.
Yet it’s one thing to act on an urge and another to adopt OS X wholesale as a lifestyle. At a recent meeting of the Exploratorium Museum’s Mac user group in San Francisco, I counted only two attendees out of 50 who were somewhat successfully living full-time with the new OS and its native applications. Both are professional Web programmers and one is a true Unix head — natural fits with OS X’s bundled Apache Web server and the BSD Unix underpinnings.
So pragmatically, the issue is how to manage your OS X transition with the least amount of pain and wasted time. After running OS X for a while, I’m enjoying the challenge of a new OS as well as the resulting inefficiencies to my workflow. Instead of installation advice, I offer a few brief tips that may minimize OS X’s potential drain on your productivity:
- Isolate OS X from your main workflow. Make your current Mac OS workflow the first priority and try to prevent the OS X education process from interfering with real work.
- Run OS X on its own machine. If necessary, buy a used PowerMac G3 or iMac for the purpose. To avoid this additional hardware expense, some users place OS X on its own hard disk partition, and then when necessary, reboot under Mac OS 9.1 from another partition. However, using a separate machine will protect your data and productivity in case something goes very wrong.
- Buy more RAM. We’re used to giving content-creation applications plenty of RAM, but make especially sure not to skimp on any machine with OS X. While 128MB is the minimum configuration, I’ve heard tell that there’s a real performance boost above 500MB.
- Install your applications later. Become familiar with the new Aqua interface first, and then add applications, both "classic" and native OS X versions. Don’t expect to replicate your old, accustomed desktop environment. Keep remembering that the issue isn’t productivity for near-term work; rather, it’s laying the foundation for a future transition.
- Monitor the time you spend reading online message threads on OS X. While using message boards to glean inside info about a new OS is invaluable, it can go too far. I looked up from the monitor the other day and found that I had spent hours poring over posts! However, I particularly like the discussions on MacInTouch and there’s a good installation tutorial by book author Derrick Story. If you really like e-mail list services, check out The Macintosh Guy. Instant spamification.
Easily Distracted
A warning: The search for OS X knowledge can become an easy excuse for procrastination. Something new, anything new, can prove a stronger attraction than the paying job at hand.
As usual, the wisdom of the Rabbis points to this pitfall on the road to learning: "Work is easy — for those who like to work." By avoiding these easily rationalized excuses for dawdling, you can get a head start on OS X and keep your productivity up.
Read more by David Morgenstern.
This article was last modified on June 30, 2023
This article was first published on May 16, 2001
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