Reflections

Macs are great machines. The first one I owned was an old Macintosh Classic about seven years ago. It ran Mac OS 6.0 which I later upgraded to Mac OS 7.something. Apart from the small monochrome screen, the Mac Classic was fun to mess around with. It had excellent word processing and desktop publishing and the best musical composition software in its time (1990s).

Inspite of the its user-friendly and innovative features, market share for the Mac has declined over the years. One of the reasons IMHO is the high pricetag. Comparatively the declining cost of an average PC and the expanding choice of software over the years made it a more viable alternative. Secondly, Apple has been concentrating their efforts in marketing its oh so popular and highly priced Apple iPod.

The advent of Mac OS X and the Mini will hopefully change things significantly. Apple has made an excellent move combining the stability and security of Open Source software with the ease of use of the Macintosh platform in an effordable system. The powerful UNIX core of the new operating system has attracted a number of UNIX developers to port existing applications to the Macintosh. Mac OS X Panther comes with X11 and many POSIX features that will run UNIX applications with little porting effort.

I now also use an iBook G3 (not the latest and greatest–I know), but it runs Mac OS X Panther smoothly without any problems. I will always be a Linux/Unix fan, but am impressed with what the Mac has finally achieved.