Time to Fly Little Birdy
Like a mother bird nosing her offspring out of the nest and into the blue, Apple has put all Mac users on notice. If you intend to buy a new Mac and boot into OS 9 or earlier, you better buy one before the end of the year. Come January 2003, all new Macs will boot OS X - period. You can still run older applications, but you will have to do so in OS X's "Classic" mode. You will not be able to change your startup disk to anything earlier.
What could seem like terrible news is actually quite positive. For one, Apple is giving consumers (and developers for that matter) 4 months notice - which is plenty of time. Two, in order for further optimizations and enhancements to OS X to be possible, it must eventually drop Classic - forever - and the only way to do that is to slowly yank the plug over the next couple of years.
Tough love hurts, but progress can often require force.
Comments
Welcome Back, Todd.
Posted by: Ryan at September 21, 2002 4:34 PM
This is good news? Seems more like arm-twisting. "Buy a brand new Mac in the next four months or you'll never see OS 9 again." Maybe this is why my copy of Jaguar did not include an OS 9 installation disk. Unfortunately that ommission made it impossible to launch Classic, and the attempt to launch Classic destabilized OS X. There's probably some reason and logic here but from a user perspective these decisions have cost me time, caused me to be unable to work, and frustrated me, and I don't see how that can be good.
Posted by: Jeffrey at September 22, 2002 9:08 AM
hopefully we'll get a new quarkxpress for osx and we can all get osx at work... please, oh, please
Posted by: ctrent at September 22, 2002 1:26 PM
Glad to see someone with reputation backing up my previous disagreement with applauding Apple's weird weird marketing policy in old WDIK comments... =)
Glad to see que-je-sais back online, Todd! =)
Karel
Posted by: karel at September 22, 2002 5:04 PM
