On Friday Oct. 26th I joined hundreds of others in a line at the local Apple store and purchased a copy of the new hotness OS X, version 10.5. I had a little trepidation about upgrading to this OS on day one due to some reviews I read on several of the popular websites complaining about a few minor here and there bugs. However, after using the OS now going on 3 days I have to say there is not a single thing I have to complain about.
First off I have a standard MacBook and it is much faster. The biggest improvement is when I put the computer to sleep and come back to it. It wakes up almost instantly and there is no hesitation with applications they all are responsive right away. So far I have to hand it to Apple they go this one right. I do have one minor complaint and that is I don’t see any of the core animation stuff that was hyped up during all the demos and so forth leading up to this launch. I suspect that development companies didn’t get their developments cycles lined up with Apples release time frame so the Leopard only applications are not ready yet. We’ll see these in the coming months. Verdict: spend the money do the upgrade it’ll be worth it.
For quite some time now I’ve been very anti mac. This mainly was a result of my experiences with some of the early macs, and the fact that I had spent a large amount of time working with UNIX. I guess in my youth and lack of experience I was too short sighted to give mac a chance when they release OSX. As the saying goes with age comes wisdom, and I believe I’ve had somewhat of an epiphany. I was reading through digg this morning and came across an article talking about the release of Xcode. I then discovered that all you have to do is fill out a simple form and boom you have access to this product. Personally to me this is what will put mac over the top. I firmly believe that more than a clean interface it is software that makes an OS successful. If you look at BSD/Linux/M$ over the years, they success came mainly from the fact they had simple to use and powerful applications. Apple has always enjoyed a niche market, but now that you have an operating system derived from UNIX, and with an easy to use IDE. I don’t see why there won’t be a flood of applications coming out that will increase the popularity and ultimately make OSX the hands down winner. Being a UNIX advocate I hope this will come to fruition. We will have to see what happens with the next versions of Windows but frankly based on what I’ve seen from Apple, and my experience with UNIX I’m pretty convinced this is it.
