It's hard to say, really. BE OS had far better multimedia support.
In terms of performance, sure. That, too, was largely a result of a compact OS that had virtually no backwards compatibility / legacy code, though. This is a luxury a BeOS + Mac OS successor could not have afforded. In short, a Mac OS X based on Mac OS and BeOS would not have been any more impressive, multimedia-wise, than what we have now with QuickTime, Quartz, Core Image, Core Video, etc.
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It was a realtime OS
That's debatable. With the few drivers, frameworks and applications it had, yes, it was fast. With all the baggage added that you need to do everyday stuff, however? Especially once you factor in legacy environments for Mac apps? I really doubt they could have preserved that.
It was lightning fast and cleanly-designed because it was done from scratch. No major OS on a PC these days has that. Mac OS X, Windows Vista, Linux, FreeBSD, whathaveyou: they all have a huge array of compatibility layers that add a massive performance burdern, but are unavoidable.
Now, when you get to more specialized devices, you don't need that. The iPhone doesn't need Carbon, and Windows CE-based smartphones don't need any Windows 9x / Win32 legacy stuff. But on a personal computer, people expect the ability to run their app from five years ago, open their document from ten years ago, and organize it all in a file system from twenty years ago. This is something Be, Inc. largely ignored.
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, and had (still has) much better metadata support,
Yes, that's true. But, I'm sorry to say, legacy. Again. Try as you may, you simply can't afford to ignore all the weak metadata implementations other OSes bring, be it through file name extensions (yuck), no additional forks, and so on. Most people, even today, still haven't learnt to work with metadata properly. You still see songs that are tagged incorrectly or not at all, files that have lots of extraneous information in their name that belongs elsewhere, and software not dealing with different formats and charsets properly. Within the BeOS 'glass house', rich metadata worked wonderfully. Within the Mac OS one, not using file name extensions did as well. But as soon as you get to the real world, all that is broken.
I would love for Apple to mandate that all files don't have extensions, use resource forks, store their type in the UTI format, and use the attribute fork for additional metadata such as subject, author, whathaveyou. But they can't.
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much better multi processor support, etc.
At the time, multiple CPUs were more of a high-end thing. Now, about a decade later, they're becoming more standard. That said, Leopard brings some multi-CPU enhancements, and I frankly don't find Tiger's multi-CPU support to be that bad either. Certainly leaps and bounds better than the awful scheduling I've observed on Windows.
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As far as the software goes, that's dicey. Every Mac developer had to rewrite all of their software anyway,
The transition to Carbon wasn't that hard.
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NEXT was a dying platform when Apple bought it. That was pretty clear.
So was Be. People wanted to believe in it because it looked pretty on paper, but there is absolutely no proof that it would have been anywhere near as good once used in the real world.
Now that Apple has some ex-Be engineers, we've been getting most of the good stuff. Spotlight isn't quite as advanced as Be's built-in search, but why do you think the media have been hyping features like Spotlight and Google Desktop Search, even when BeOS had them over a decade ago? Because now, they're actually practical.
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The $400 million Apple paid was roundly criticized as being far more than the company was worth.
I can't comment on that.
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We don't know what would have happened if BE was chosen.
No, we ultimately don't, but I'm confident that there was nothing inherently wrong with Apple's choice. I'm very happy with Steve as a CEO, and I'm also happy with Mac OS X being one of the most impressive operating systems on the planet. We don't know either way if the marriage with BeOS would have been better or worse, or working at all.
I'm only arguing that there is no pressing need for one.
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If Tiger had major problems of its own, then it, too, should have been delayed. There is simply NO excuse to release an OS, or any other program for that matter, if it has major issues. Even numerous minor issues should hold it back.
Define "major issue". Panther had this thing where, if you connected a FireWire drive, you rank risk of destroying it. Now that was a screw-up. iTunes 2.0 had a mistake in a Perl script that would zero out hard drives if they had spaces in their names. Big-time screw-up. You'll find few such examples, though.
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If Tiger did have major issues, and thankfully, it didn't, then IT should have been fixed, quickly, and the developer teams moved to it without consideration of the release of the next version, which, at that time, had no definite release date anyway.
Yes, of course.
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Originally Posted by melgross
Many people here were SO sure that it would arrive in a point release, and an early one.
Indeed; I was admittedly one of them.
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I wonder if it is now one of the secret new features of Leopard.
In terms of performance, sure. That, too, was largely a result of a compact OS that had virtually no backwards compatibility / legacy code, though. This is a luxury a BeOS + Mac OS successor could not have afforded. In short, a Mac OS X based on Mac OS and BeOS would not have been any more impressive, multimedia-wise, than what we have now with QuickTime, Quartz, Core Image, Core Video, etc.
That's debatable. With the few drivers, frameworks and applications it had, yes, it was fast. With all the baggage added that you need to do everyday stuff, however? Especially once you factor in legacy environments for Mac apps? I really doubt they could have preserved that.
It was lightning fast and cleanly-designed because it was done from scratch. No major OS on a PC these days has that. Mac OS X, Windows Vista, Linux, FreeBSD, whathaveyou: they all have a huge array of compatibility layers that add a massive performance burdern, but are unavoidable.
Now, when you get to more specialized devices, you don't need that. The iPhone doesn't need Carbon, and Windows CE-based smartphones don't need any Windows 9x / Win32 legacy stuff. But on a personal computer, people expect the ability to run their app from five years ago, open their document from ten years ago, and organize it all in a file system from twenty years ago. This is something Be, Inc. largely ignored.
Yes, that's true. But, I'm sorry to say, legacy. Again. Try as you may, you simply can't afford to ignore all the weak metadata implementations other OSes bring, be it through file name extensions (yuck), no additional forks, and so on. Most people, even today, still haven't learnt to work with metadata properly. You still see songs that are tagged incorrectly or not at all, files that have lots of extraneous information in their name that belongs elsewhere, and software not dealing with different formats and charsets properly. Within the BeOS 'glass house', rich metadata worked wonderfully. Within the Mac OS one, not using file name extensions did as well. But as soon as you get to the real world, all that is broken.
I would love for Apple to mandate that all files don't have extensions, use resource forks, store their type in the UTI format, and use the attribute fork for additional metadata such as subject, author, whathaveyou. But they can't.
At the time, multiple CPUs were more of a high-end thing. Now, about a decade later, they're becoming more standard. That said, Leopard brings some multi-CPU enhancements, and I frankly don't find Tiger's multi-CPU support to be that bad either. Certainly leaps and bounds better than the awful scheduling I've observed on Windows.
The transition to Carbon wasn't that hard.
So was Be. People wanted to believe in it because it looked pretty on paper, but there is absolutely no proof that it would have been anywhere near as good once used in the real world.
Now that Apple has some ex-Be engineers, we've been getting most of the good stuff. Spotlight isn't quite as advanced as Be's built-in search, but why do you think the media have been hyping features like Spotlight and Google Desktop Search, even when BeOS had them over a decade ago? Because now, they're actually practical.
I can't comment on that.
No, we ultimately don't, but I'm confident that there was nothing inherently wrong with Apple's choice. I'm very happy with Steve as a CEO, and I'm also happy with Mac OS X being one of the most impressive operating systems on the planet. We don't know either way if the marriage with BeOS would have been better or worse, or working at all.
What's being done here is looking at an OS that is over ten years older than it was back in 1997.
It's easy to look at what X is now, and what BE was back then. But, if Be was here now, we could say the same thing about NextStep. Nextstep was considered to be a poor fit back then.
Everything that Apple has done with NEXT, Apple could have done to BE as well, perhaps quite a bit more.
I'm not saying that this was, ultimately, the wrong choice, we will never know that, but, I'm saying that there was plenty of controversy about it back then.
One of the reasons why BE wasn't chosen was also because Gassé (how do you spell his name?), was very open about his desire to take over Apple should such an acquisition have been made. If he hadn't said that, BE would very possibly be the OS of Apple today.
Jobs said no such thing, but we know what happened.
I'm only arguing that there is no pressing need for one.
I haven't said there is either.
I'm saying that the publicity fmor a delayed release could hurt Apple.
If Apple announced a release of October a year ago, I would have been fine with it. You know my feelings about the quality of releases and release dates.
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Define "major issue". Panther had this thing where, if you connected a FireWire drive, you rank risk of destroying it. Now that was a screw-up. iTunes 2.0 had a mistake in a Perl script that would zero out hard drives if they had spaces in their names. Big-time screw-up. You'll find few such examples, though.
Tiger has the exact same issue with Firewire drives. For the first time in my life, I lost three firewire drives from this issue. And I follow EVERY procedure Apple reccomends. Three!
That's the biggest issue though, and so far, Apple can't seem to fix it.
Well, more important is the fact that without NextStep, Apple would not have Steve Jobs on board again.
It's Steve Jobs that had the vision for MacOSX to become what it is today. If BeOS was choosen to be the follow-up for MacOS 9, perhaps technically the OS would have been better, but Apple would still be in financial trouble, and without a proper vision.
What's being done here is looking at an OS that is over ten years older than it was back in 1997.
Do we really have a useful comparison point?
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Everything that Apple has done with NEXT, Apple could have done to BE as well, perhaps quite a bit more.
This is plain false. For instance, of the many open source projects Apple takes advantage of, few would have run on BeOS directly, unless Apple had build a comprehensive compatibility layer, which would have taken massive amounts of time and which NeXT, no the other hand, already had. Even with such a layer, the new Mac OS would have been forever doomed (just like the old one) to be a class of its own, whereas now, Mac OS X is very much a Unix (legally speaking, more so than Linux is), thus leaving us with only two major operating system hierarchies, Unix and NT. With BeOS, this would have been so hard to accomplish that a rewrite (or going for NeXT) would have been easier. The lack of Unix, or even just POSIX, is a huge argument against BeOS, and is as valid today as it was in the 90s.
There are hundreds of "alpha geeks" who have gone to Mac OS X (frequently from Linux, or even from Solaris) because it is the single best Unix-based desktop OS.
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One of the reasons why BE wasn't chosen was also because Gassé (how do you spell his name?),
You're missing a final e. Jean-Louis Gassée.
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was very open about his desire to take over Apple should such an acquisition have been made. If he hadn't said that, BE would very possibly be the OS of Apple today.
Not to mention he simple wasn't anywhere near as good a leader as Steve Jobs.
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Jobs said no such thing, but we know what happened.
That's true. But we also know what happened to Be, Inc. Gassée came up with the "Internet Appliance" nonsense that, neither then nor now, anyone really wants to have, and then finally ended up selling (for a laughably low price) to PalmSource, who failed to turn it (PalmOS 6 Cobalt) into an OS that anyone really wanted to use. PalmOne didn't, Sony moved out, and so on.
There are some open source efforts, such as Haiku (formerly OpenBeOS), and I occasionally take a look and smile at what could have been. But it wasn't meant to be.
I'm saying that the publicity fmor a delayed release could hurt Apple.
No doubt it does, and deservedly so. Apple screwed up.
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If Apple announced a release of October a year ago, I would have been fine with it. You know my feelings about the quality of releases and release dates.
And I agree with that.
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I've moved to SATA E instead.
I wish they'd add eSATA bootability to their EFI implementation.
Well, more important is the fact that without NextStep, Apple would not have Steve Jobs on board again.
That certainly plays a role, but this is more about the merits of the operating systems.
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It's Steve Jobs that had the vision for MacOSX to become what it is today. If BeOS was choosen to be the follow-up for MacOS 9, perhaps technically the OS would have been better, but Apple would still be in financial trouble, and without a proper vision.
Well, more important is the fact that without NextStep, Apple would not have Steve Jobs on board again.
It's Steve Jobs that had the vision for MacOSX to become what it is today. If BeOS was choosen to be the follow-up for MacOS 9, perhaps technically the OS would have been better, but Apple would still be in financial trouble, and without a proper vision.
You don't know that. The first several years of Job's comeback, Apple continued to slide. It was really onlt the iPod that changed that. Part of that was foresight, part luck.
I'm comparing the OS's back when Apple was first considering them.
Comparing an OS with ten years of major development with one that was underfunded in the best of times, and has been effectively gone for five or six years isn't useful.
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This is plain false. For instance, of the many open source projects Apple takes advantage of, few would have run on BeOS directly, unless Apple had build a comprehensive compatibility layer, which would have taken massive amounts of time and which NeXT, no the other hand, already had. Even with such a layer, the new Mac OS would have been forever doomed (just like the old one) to be a class of its own, whereas now, Mac OS X is very much a Unix (legally speaking, more so than Linux is), thus leaving us with only two major operating system hierarchies, Unix and NT. With BeOS, this would have been so hard to accomplish that a rewrite (or going for NeXT) would have been easier. The lack of Unix, or even just POSIX, is a huge argument against BeOS, and is as valid today as it was in the 90s.
While all of that is true, it doesn'r mean that BE couldn't have been brought up to what X is now, but in its own way. Again, remember that over ten years have gone by
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There are hundreds of "alpha geeks" who have gone to Mac OS X (frequently from Linux, or even from Solaris) because it is the single best Unix-based desktop OS.
Yeah, hundreds. That keeps Apple afloat.
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You're missing a final e. Jean-Louis Gassée.
I could never spell.
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Not to mention he simple wasn't anywhere near as good a leader as Steve Jobs.
I won't argue that. I never did like him much.
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That's true. But we also know what happened to Be, Inc. Gassée came up with the "Internet Appliance" nonsense that, neither then nor now, anyone really wants to have, and then finally ended up selling (for a laughably low price) to PalmSource, who failed to turn it (PalmOS 6 Cobalt) into an OS that anyone really wanted to use. PalmOne didn't, Sony moved out, and so on.
That was a desperate move to save the company, and OS after Apple refused to give them any more rights to the hardware they needed for development. As the original OS was designed around the PPC, the development costs to bring it to the x86 platform were crippling. It became a geek OS, as have so many before it.
I still have my box of version Preview 2 with upgrades through 4.5 on my shelf.
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There are some open source efforts, such as Haiku (formerly OpenBeOS), and I occasionally take a look and smile at what could have been. But it wasn't meant to be.
Yeah, I know about them. But, frankly, that is all a waste. It's a hobbyist OS now, nothing more.
While all of that is true, it doesn'r mean that BE couldn't have been brought up to what X is now, but in its own way. Again, remember that over ten years have gone by
True, but NeXT already had that foundation right from the start.
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Yeah, hundreds. That keeps Apple afloat.
No, but where alpha geeks lead, developers follow, and where developers write software, a user base grows. None of this ever happened to BeOS.
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Yeah, I know about them. But, frankly, that is all a waste. It's a hobbyist OS now, nothing more.
True, but NeXT already had that foundation right from the start.
True, but Apple had to rewrite much of it. The open software developers still scream at Apple for not following their rules for annotations and coding.
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No, but where alpha geeks lead, developers follow, and where developers write software, a user base grows. None of this ever happened to BeOS.
Of course not. BE OS was never popular enough for anyone to switch to it. These geeks are only switching now, or at least within the past two years or so. BE was dead long before that.
It never had a chance as a third solution. Only Apple and MS can do that. Linux is a special case, as it's free, for the most part, and except for commercial versions, requires little paid programming, no advertising, and no support. Mostly, it's also a geek OS.
Melgross, thank you so much for using "its" and "it's" correctly. You are one of, sadly, a very small minority on this forum
RE: Quartz 2D extreme: it is in 10.4, just not turned on. You can turn it on with the developer tools. But there are some problems; it isn't very stable, and there are odd performance issues. Whilst it makes many operations much, much faster, it can severely slow down text rendering in some applications. I don't know if CoreText helps in this area.
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Originally Posted by melgross
Apple dropped several major features along the way, such as the Yellow Box support.
huh? Yellow Box is Cocoa. Are you not thinking of the original OS X (server) release (it had OS 8's platinum UI, not aqua), which didn't have Carbon?
RE: Quartz 2D extreme: it is in 10.4, just not turned on.
I don't know about PowerPC Macs, but I don't believe any Intel version of Mac OS X 10.4 ever had it, Quartz Debug enabling or not.
If you can convince me otherwise, fair enough.
With it 'enabled' (which doesn't do anything), Rosetta apps have drawing glitches. Intel-native apps, however, do not have accelerated. Again, this may be different for PowerPC Macs.
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huh? Yellow Box is Cocoa. Are you not thinking of the original OS X (server) release (it had OS 8's platinum UI, not aqua), which didn't have Carbon?
He presumably either means Red Box, or Yellow Box on Windows.
[QUOTE=Mr. H;1072794]Melgross, thank you so much for using "its" and "it's" correctly. You are one of, sadly, a very small minority on this forum
Thanks. I work hard on that. sometimes, I too, type it that way, out of habit, but I check, and correct them. If I don't, you can consider it to be a typo.
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RE: Quartz 2D extreme: it is in 10.4, just not turned on. You can turn it on with the developer tools. But there are some problems; it isn't very stable, and there are odd performance issues. Whilst it makes many operations much, much faster, it can severely slow down text rendering in some applications. I don't know if CoreText helps in this area.
Yes it is. It isn't turned on because it's buggy, and causes too many problems. Apparently, Apple couldn't fix that, so they left it there for developers to play with until they could.
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huh? Yellow Box is Cocoa. Are you not thinking of the original OS X (server) release (it had OS 8's platinum UI, not aqua), which didn't have Carbon?
Perhaps I've named it wrongly. I was talking about the x86 compatability box. What was it called? I obviously don't remember.
What happened to Quartz in 10.4? We were promised that feature, but, it still hasn't arrived.
Was Quartz 2D Extreme ever announced in public or only at closed WWDC sessions? Please remember that Quartz 2D alone got quite a speed boost in Tiger (roughly ten times as fast).
I simply don't agree with your assertion that Leopard has major problems, unless you refine what you mean by that. Further, I also don't feel that Tiger has any alarming issues that should make Apple rush out a new OS.
I don't remember the Tiger seeds 2-4 months from release were any different than the current Leopard seed - especially the server seeds were almost "untestable"
What they seed is not necessarily the latest code check ins from Apple developers.
They've updated a lot through the years, but is that a rewrite?
They rewrote a fair amount of the code of the open software they use, or added much to it. That's why the whining from the open software crowd that Apple doesn't do it the way they want.
Apple added many features to FreeBSD and other projects it contributed code to.
Comments
It's hard to say, really. BE OS had far better multimedia support.
In terms of performance, sure. That, too, was largely a result of a compact OS that had virtually no backwards compatibility / legacy code, though. This is a luxury a BeOS + Mac OS successor could not have afforded. In short, a Mac OS X based on Mac OS and BeOS would not have been any more impressive, multimedia-wise, than what we have now with QuickTime, Quartz, Core Image, Core Video, etc.
It was a realtime OS
That's debatable. With the few drivers, frameworks and applications it had, yes, it was fast. With all the baggage added that you need to do everyday stuff, however? Especially once you factor in legacy environments for Mac apps? I really doubt they could have preserved that.
It was lightning fast and cleanly-designed because it was done from scratch. No major OS on a PC these days has that. Mac OS X, Windows Vista, Linux, FreeBSD, whathaveyou: they all have a huge array of compatibility layers that add a massive performance burdern, but are unavoidable.
Now, when you get to more specialized devices, you don't need that. The iPhone doesn't need Carbon, and Windows CE-based smartphones don't need any Windows 9x / Win32 legacy stuff. But on a personal computer, people expect the ability to run their app from five years ago, open their document from ten years ago, and organize it all in a file system from twenty years ago. This is something Be, Inc. largely ignored.
, and had (still has) much better metadata support,
Yes, that's true. But, I'm sorry to say, legacy. Again. Try as you may, you simply can't afford to ignore all the weak metadata implementations other OSes bring, be it through file name extensions (yuck), no additional forks, and so on. Most people, even today, still haven't learnt to work with metadata properly. You still see songs that are tagged incorrectly or not at all, files that have lots of extraneous information in their name that belongs elsewhere, and software not dealing with different formats and charsets properly. Within the BeOS 'glass house', rich metadata worked wonderfully. Within the Mac OS one, not using file name extensions did as well. But as soon as you get to the real world, all that is broken.
I would love for Apple to mandate that all files don't have extensions, use resource forks, store their type in the UTI format, and use the attribute fork for additional metadata such as subject, author, whathaveyou. But they can't.
much better multi processor support, etc.
At the time, multiple CPUs were more of a high-end thing. Now, about a decade later, they're becoming more standard. That said, Leopard brings some multi-CPU enhancements, and I frankly don't find Tiger's multi-CPU support to be that bad either. Certainly leaps and bounds better than the awful scheduling I've observed on Windows.
As far as the software goes, that's dicey. Every Mac developer had to rewrite all of their software anyway,
The transition to Carbon wasn't that hard.
NEXT was a dying platform when Apple bought it. That was pretty clear.
So was Be. People wanted to believe in it because it looked pretty on paper, but there is absolutely no proof that it would have been anywhere near as good once used in the real world.
Now that Apple has some ex-Be engineers, we've been getting most of the good stuff. Spotlight isn't quite as advanced as Be's built-in search, but why do you think the media have been hyping features like Spotlight and Google Desktop Search, even when BeOS had them over a decade ago? Because now, they're actually practical.
The $400 million Apple paid was roundly criticized as being far more than the company was worth.
I can't comment on that.
We don't know what would have happened if BE was chosen.
No, we ultimately don't, but I'm confident that there was nothing inherently wrong with Apple's choice. I'm very happy with Steve as a CEO, and I'm also happy with Mac OS X being one of the most impressive operating systems on the planet. We don't know either way if the marriage with BeOS would have been better or worse, or working at all.
Do you consider an on-time release to be a rush?
I'm only arguing that there is no pressing need for one.
If Tiger had major problems of its own, then it, too, should have been delayed. There is simply NO excuse to release an OS, or any other program for that matter, if it has major issues. Even numerous minor issues should hold it back.
Define "major issue". Panther had this thing where, if you connected a FireWire drive, you rank risk of destroying it. Now that was a screw-up. iTunes 2.0 had a mistake in a Perl script that would zero out hard drives if they had spaces in their names. Big-time screw-up. You'll find few such examples, though.
If Tiger did have major issues, and thankfully, it didn't, then IT should have been fixed, quickly, and the developer teams moved to it without consideration of the release of the next version, which, at that time, had no definite release date anyway.
Yes, of course.
Many people here were SO sure that it would arrive in a point release, and an early one.
Indeed; I was admittedly one of them.
I wonder if it is now one of the secret new features of Leopard.
It's there in Leopard.
In terms of performance, sure. That, too, was largely a result of a compact OS that had virtually no backwards compatibility / legacy code, though. This is a luxury a BeOS + Mac OS successor could not have afforded. In short, a Mac OS X based on Mac OS and BeOS would not have been any more impressive, multimedia-wise, than what we have now with QuickTime, Quartz, Core Image, Core Video, etc.
That's debatable. With the few drivers, frameworks and applications it had, yes, it was fast. With all the baggage added that you need to do everyday stuff, however? Especially once you factor in legacy environments for Mac apps? I really doubt they could have preserved that.
It was lightning fast and cleanly-designed because it was done from scratch. No major OS on a PC these days has that. Mac OS X, Windows Vista, Linux, FreeBSD, whathaveyou: they all have a huge array of compatibility layers that add a massive performance burdern, but are unavoidable.
Now, when you get to more specialized devices, you don't need that. The iPhone doesn't need Carbon, and Windows CE-based smartphones don't need any Windows 9x / Win32 legacy stuff. But on a personal computer, people expect the ability to run their app from five years ago, open their document from ten years ago, and organize it all in a file system from twenty years ago. This is something Be, Inc. largely ignored.
Yes, that's true. But, I'm sorry to say, legacy. Again. Try as you may, you simply can't afford to ignore all the weak metadata implementations other OSes bring, be it through file name extensions (yuck), no additional forks, and so on. Most people, even today, still haven't learnt to work with metadata properly. You still see songs that are tagged incorrectly or not at all, files that have lots of extraneous information in their name that belongs elsewhere, and software not dealing with different formats and charsets properly. Within the BeOS 'glass house', rich metadata worked wonderfully. Within the Mac OS one, not using file name extensions did as well. But as soon as you get to the real world, all that is broken.
I would love for Apple to mandate that all files don't have extensions, use resource forks, store their type in the UTI format, and use the attribute fork for additional metadata such as subject, author, whathaveyou. But they can't.
At the time, multiple CPUs were more of a high-end thing. Now, about a decade later, they're becoming more standard. That said, Leopard brings some multi-CPU enhancements, and I frankly don't find Tiger's multi-CPU support to be that bad either. Certainly leaps and bounds better than the awful scheduling I've observed on Windows.
The transition to Carbon wasn't that hard.
So was Be. People wanted to believe in it because it looked pretty on paper, but there is absolutely no proof that it would have been anywhere near as good once used in the real world.
Now that Apple has some ex-Be engineers, we've been getting most of the good stuff. Spotlight isn't quite as advanced as Be's built-in search, but why do you think the media have been hyping features like Spotlight and Google Desktop Search, even when BeOS had them over a decade ago? Because now, they're actually practical.
I can't comment on that.
No, we ultimately don't, but I'm confident that there was nothing inherently wrong with Apple's choice. I'm very happy with Steve as a CEO, and I'm also happy with Mac OS X being one of the most impressive operating systems on the planet. We don't know either way if the marriage with BeOS would have been better or worse, or working at all.
What's being done here is looking at an OS that is over ten years older than it was back in 1997.
It's easy to look at what X is now, and what BE was back then. But, if Be was here now, we could say the same thing about NextStep. Nextstep was considered to be a poor fit back then.
Everything that Apple has done with NEXT, Apple could have done to BE as well, perhaps quite a bit more.
I'm not saying that this was, ultimately, the wrong choice, we will never know that, but, I'm saying that there was plenty of controversy about it back then.
One of the reasons why BE wasn't chosen was also because Gassé (how do you spell his name?), was very open about his desire to take over Apple should such an acquisition have been made. If he hadn't said that, BE would very possibly be the OS of Apple today.
Jobs said no such thing, but we know what happened.
I'm only arguing that there is no pressing need for one.
I haven't said there is either.
I'm saying that the publicity fmor a delayed release could hurt Apple.
If Apple announced a release of October a year ago, I would have been fine with it. You know my feelings about the quality of releases and release dates.
Define "major issue". Panther had this thing where, if you connected a FireWire drive, you rank risk of destroying it. Now that was a screw-up. iTunes 2.0 had a mistake in a Perl script that would zero out hard drives if they had spaces in their names. Big-time screw-up. You'll find few such examples, though.
Tiger has the exact same issue with Firewire drives. For the first time in my life, I lost three firewire drives from this issue. And I follow EVERY procedure Apple reccomends. Three!
That's the biggest issue though, and so far, Apple can't seem to fix it.
I've moved to SATA E instead.
It's Steve Jobs that had the vision for MacOSX to become what it is today. If BeOS was choosen to be the follow-up for MacOS 9, perhaps technically the OS would have been better, but Apple would still be in financial trouble, and without a proper vision.
What's being done here is looking at an OS that is over ten years older than it was back in 1997.
Do we really have a useful comparison point?
Everything that Apple has done with NEXT, Apple could have done to BE as well, perhaps quite a bit more.
This is plain false. For instance, of the many open source projects Apple takes advantage of, few would have run on BeOS directly, unless Apple had build a comprehensive compatibility layer, which would have taken massive amounts of time and which NeXT, no the other hand, already had. Even with such a layer, the new Mac OS would have been forever doomed (just like the old one) to be a class of its own, whereas now, Mac OS X is very much a Unix (legally speaking, more so than Linux is), thus leaving us with only two major operating system hierarchies, Unix and NT. With BeOS, this would have been so hard to accomplish that a rewrite (or going for NeXT) would have been easier. The lack of Unix, or even just POSIX, is a huge argument against BeOS, and is as valid today as it was in the 90s.
There are hundreds of "alpha geeks" who have gone to Mac OS X (frequently from Linux, or even from Solaris) because it is the single best Unix-based desktop OS.
One of the reasons why BE wasn't chosen was also because Gassé (how do you spell his name?),
You're missing a final e.
was very open about his desire to take over Apple should such an acquisition have been made. If he hadn't said that, BE would very possibly be the OS of Apple today.
Not to mention he simple wasn't anywhere near as good a leader as Steve Jobs.
Jobs said no such thing, but we know what happened.
That's true. But we also know what happened to Be, Inc. Gassée came up with the "Internet Appliance" nonsense that, neither then nor now, anyone really wants to have, and then finally ended up selling (for a laughably low price) to PalmSource, who failed to turn it (PalmOS 6 Cobalt) into an OS that anyone really wanted to use. PalmOne didn't, Sony moved out, and so on.
There are some open source efforts, such as Haiku (formerly OpenBeOS), and I occasionally take a look and smile at what could have been. But it wasn't meant to be.
I haven't said there is either.
I'm saying that the publicity fmor a delayed release could hurt Apple.
No doubt it does, and deservedly so. Apple screwed up.
If Apple announced a release of October a year ago, I would have been fine with it. You know my feelings about the quality of releases and release dates.
And I agree with that.
I've moved to SATA E instead.
I wish they'd add eSATA bootability to their EFI implementation.
Well, more important is the fact that without NextStep, Apple would not have Steve Jobs on board again.
That certainly plays a role, but this is more about the merits of the operating systems.
It's Steve Jobs that had the vision for MacOSX to become what it is today. If BeOS was choosen to be the follow-up for MacOS 9, perhaps technically the OS would have been better, but Apple would still be in financial trouble, and without a proper vision.
Agreed.
Well, more important is the fact that without NextStep, Apple would not have Steve Jobs on board again.
It's Steve Jobs that had the vision for MacOSX to become what it is today. If BeOS was choosen to be the follow-up for MacOS 9, perhaps technically the OS would have been better, but Apple would still be in financial trouble, and without a proper vision.
You don't know that. The first several years of Job's comeback, Apple continued to slide. It was really onlt the iPod that changed that. Part of that was foresight, part luck.
Do we really have a useful comparison point?
I'm comparing the OS's back when Apple was first considering them.
Comparing an OS with ten years of major development with one that was underfunded in the best of times, and has been effectively gone for five or six years isn't useful.
This is plain false. For instance, of the many open source projects Apple takes advantage of, few would have run on BeOS directly, unless Apple had build a comprehensive compatibility layer, which would have taken massive amounts of time and which NeXT, no the other hand, already had. Even with such a layer, the new Mac OS would have been forever doomed (just like the old one) to be a class of its own, whereas now, Mac OS X is very much a Unix (legally speaking, more so than Linux is), thus leaving us with only two major operating system hierarchies, Unix and NT. With BeOS, this would have been so hard to accomplish that a rewrite (or going for NeXT) would have been easier. The lack of Unix, or even just POSIX, is a huge argument against BeOS, and is as valid today as it was in the 90s.
While all of that is true, it doesn'r mean that BE couldn't have been brought up to what X is now, but in its own way. Again, remember that over ten years have gone by
There are hundreds of "alpha geeks" who have gone to Mac OS X (frequently from Linux, or even from Solaris) because it is the single best Unix-based desktop OS.
Yeah, hundreds. That keeps Apple afloat.
You're missing a final e.
I could never spell.
Not to mention he simple wasn't anywhere near as good a leader as Steve Jobs.
I won't argue that. I never did like him much.
That's true. But we also know what happened to Be, Inc. Gassée came up with the "Internet Appliance" nonsense that, neither then nor now, anyone really wants to have, and then finally ended up selling (for a laughably low price) to PalmSource, who failed to turn it (PalmOS 6 Cobalt) into an OS that anyone really wanted to use. PalmOne didn't, Sony moved out, and so on.
That was a desperate move to save the company, and OS after Apple refused to give them any more rights to the hardware they needed for development. As the original OS was designed around the PPC, the development costs to bring it to the x86 platform were crippling. It became a geek OS, as have so many before it.
I still have my box of version Preview 2 with upgrades through 4.5 on my shelf.
There are some open source efforts, such as Haiku (formerly OpenBeOS), and I occasionally take a look and smile at what could have been. But it wasn't meant to be.
Yeah, I know about them. But, frankly, that is all a waste. It's a hobbyist OS now, nothing more.
While all of that is true, it doesn'r mean that BE couldn't have been brought up to what X is now, but in its own way. Again, remember that over ten years have gone by
True, but NeXT already had that foundation right from the start.
Yeah, hundreds. That keeps Apple afloat.
No, but where alpha geeks lead, developers follow, and where developers write software, a user base grows. None of this ever happened to BeOS.
Yeah, I know about them. But, frankly, that is all a waste. It's a hobbyist OS now, nothing more.
Yup.
True, but NeXT already had that foundation right from the start.
True, but Apple had to rewrite much of it. The open software developers still scream at Apple for not following their rules for annotations and coding.
No, but where alpha geeks lead, developers follow, and where developers write software, a user base grows. None of this ever happened to BeOS.
Of course not. BE OS was never popular enough for anyone to switch to it. These geeks are only switching now, or at least within the past two years or so. BE was dead long before that.
It never had a chance as a third solution. Only Apple and MS can do that. Linux is a special case, as it's free, for the most part, and except for commercial versions, requires little paid programming, no advertising, and no support. Mostly, it's also a geek OS.
RE: Quartz 2D extreme: it is in 10.4, just not turned on. You can turn it on with the developer tools. But there are some problems; it isn't very stable, and there are odd performance issues. Whilst it makes many operations much, much faster, it can severely slow down text rendering in some applications. I don't know if CoreText helps in this area.
Apple dropped several major features along the way, such as the Yellow Box support.
huh? Yellow Box is Cocoa. Are you not thinking of the original OS X (server) release (it had OS 8's platinum UI, not aqua), which didn't have Carbon?
RE: Quartz 2D extreme: it is in 10.4, just not turned on.
I don't know about PowerPC Macs, but I don't believe any Intel version of Mac OS X 10.4 ever had it, Quartz Debug enabling or not.
If you can convince me otherwise, fair enough.
With it 'enabled' (which doesn't do anything), Rosetta apps have drawing glitches. Intel-native apps, however, do not have accelerated. Again, this may be different for PowerPC Macs.
huh? Yellow Box is Cocoa. Are you not thinking of the original OS X (server) release (it had OS 8's platinum UI, not aqua), which didn't have Carbon?
He presumably either means Red Box, or Yellow Box on Windows.
Thanks. I work hard on that. sometimes, I too, type it that way, out of habit, but I check, and correct them. If I don't, you can consider it to be a typo.
RE: Quartz 2D extreme: it is in 10.4, just not turned on. You can turn it on with the developer tools. But there are some problems; it isn't very stable, and there are odd performance issues. Whilst it makes many operations much, much faster, it can severely slow down text rendering in some applications. I don't know if CoreText helps in this area.
Yes it is. It isn't turned on because it's buggy, and causes too many problems. Apparently, Apple couldn't fix that, so they left it there for developers to play with until they could.
huh? Yellow Box is Cocoa. Are you not thinking of the original OS X (server) release (it had OS 8's platinum UI, not aqua), which didn't have Carbon?
Perhaps I've named it wrongly. I was talking about the x86 compatability box. What was it called? I obviously don't remember.
What happened to Quartz in 10.4? We were promised that feature, but, it still hasn't arrived.
Was Quartz 2D Extreme ever announced in public or only at closed WWDC sessions? Please remember that Quartz 2D alone got quite a speed boost in Tiger (roughly ten times as fast).
I simply don't agree with your assertion that Leopard has major problems, unless you refine what you mean by that. Further, I also don't feel that Tiger has any alarming issues that should make Apple rush out a new OS.
I don't remember the Tiger seeds 2-4 months from release were any different than the current Leopard seed - especially the server seeds were almost "untestable"
What they seed is not necessarily the latest code check ins from Apple developers.
Was Quartz 2D Extreme ever announced in public or only at closed WWDC sessions?
In public.
True, but Apple had to rewrite much of it.
What?
They've updated a lot through the years, but is that a rewrite?
What?
They've updated a lot through the years, but is that a rewrite?
They rewrote a fair amount of the code of the open software they use, or added much to it. That's why the whining from the open software crowd that Apple doesn't do it the way they want.
Apple added many features to FreeBSD and other projects it contributed code to.