Why Mac OS X Matters
Mac Tip#38/16-Jan-2002

This year’s MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, January 7 to 11, brought several interesting or important announcements.

Products

There’s a new iMac now, quite radically different from previous iMacs and in fact from any other computer I know of. Slightly resembling a desk lamp it has a rounded base which contains the CPU and other vital stuff, an arm, and a flat screen at the end of the arm. It might sound a little silly from that description but it looks to be a beautifully designed machine. If you buy one it will come set to run OS X. http://www.apple.com/imac

Along with the new Mac is a new piece of software called iPhoto. This leaps into action when you plug a digital camera into your Mac. It grabs all the photos, organises them and gives you previews which you can zoom in and out. It also lets you crop photos and deal with red eye, along with some other functions. This is plenty easier and quicker than some of the long-winded and slow other methods of getting photos out of a digital camera and into a computer. It will only work with OS X. http://www.apple.com/iphoto

Mac OS X

The most important announcement though was that all new Macs from now on will ship with OS X as the default. http://www.apple.com/macosx

Tip 28 covered Operating Systems, but I need to explain what’s so important about this change.

OS X is a radically different way of working with your Mac. It’s very different from every previous Macintosh operating system. For those new to Macs this isn’t so important, but for those of us who’ve been using Macs for a while we’ll need to learn a lot of new ways of working.

Although OS X has been installed on Macs for the last few months, if you’ve bought a new machine recently it will have been set to start up with OS 9 and you would have to deliberately choose to use OS X. For the next few months things will work the other way round. [After that I'm guessing we will no longer have the option of using OS 9.]

As new versions are created of the software we use we’ll increasingly find that we have to be using OS X in order to run it. For example, suppose I currently use Microsoft Office version 98 or 2000. The latest version is called Office vX, and won’t run on any operating system before OS X. The iPhoto software I mentioned above will only run on OS X too.

What this Means

So, what does this mean? If you have a Mac and are using it happily, it does everything you want it to do and you have all the software you need then you don’t really need to do anything just now. Just start paying attention to the existence of OS X.

If you buy a new Mac soon to replace or fit in with your existing Mac then you will need to choose whether to run that new Mac on OS 9 or OS X and your decision will have to include considerations of software and training.

Before too long if you need or want to upgrade the software you use, you might find that you need OS X. As OS X needs a certain minimum level of power and speed it is possible you might have to buy a new Mac, if you are currently using an older Mac.

To use Mac OS X, you will need an iMac, iBook, Power Mac G3, Power Mac G4, Power Mac G4 Cube, PowerBook G3, or PowerBook G4 computer with at least 128MB of physical RAM. Mac OS X does not support the original PowerBook G3 or processor upgrade cards. See MacTips 27 to 30 to find out which model Mac you have and how much RAM etc it has.

For all of us who will be using OS X sooner or later, we will need some extra training. I’m about to start on that training process myself. A new iBook and an 800 page manual are at the top of my equipment list.