I had recently moved to California from the my home town of Philadelphia, and I was using a PowerBook Wall Street. The FedEx guy asked me “What is it with the Apple deliveries today; this is the fifth one I’ve done already.” I knew I had moved to the right part of the country.
Like most Mac heads who was sticking it out with Apple through the “beleaguered” years, I was very excited about the prospects of OS X. Unlike many Mac fans, I almost immediately jumped on the benefits of the new OS, despite its MANY shortcomings early on.
The Public Beta ran like crap on my years-old PowerBook. I just barely made the cutoff for compatibility, and it showed. But I didn’t care. Aqua was so wildly different from the restrained look of OS 9. The Dock was a great new tool. Column View was awesome. I couldn’t begin to imagine going back to the Classic Mac OS, though I’d be forced to for a few years while software companies got their programs in order.
It was bad enough listening to all the anti-Mac Microsoft zealots telling me that my Mac was a piece of crap. Now I had to listen to fellow Apple fans bash OS X because “OS 9 was so much better.” But Apple showed no signs of capitulating. We were being shown the future, and that was that.
I’ve never been afraid of technological change, and I give Apple credit for doing then what it continues to do now, which is to move the ball forward, no matter how unpopular that can sometimes be. OS X was a HUGE gamble; developers as well as users were threatening to jump ship for good, and many were making good on those threats. But Apple went ahead and shipped OS X anyway, and the last decade has proven them right.
OS X was supposed to be a new “OS for the next decade.” I have a feeling it will be around much longer than that. From the iPhone to the new Apple TV, to the iPad, I think OS X has proven it is modern and adaptable enough to suit Apple for a long time to come.
