The Mac is dead... long live the Mac

Turning supertankers around is never trivial, because of the inertia of everything on board. That's why they keep hitting obstacles. But for Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Computer, the hard bit of the past two years – when he's had the helm wrenched to hard-a-port – may at last be over. Apple is beginning to win the argument about its new Unix-based OS X operating system. Companies and software developers that hadn't looked at Apple for years, or never previously considered it, are looking afresh: its Unix is complete, cheap, comes in a friendly package (with the Apple GUI on top), and has more and more tools and programs available for it every day. Yet paradoxically this journey to the future is being resisted by huge chunks of the existing Mac user base. The interesting question now is, does Jobs need them to come with him for his mission to succeed?

Traditionally, Macs have been bought by graphics artists, publishing companies, music and video producers, essentially anyone in media. But the limitations of the previous "classic" Mac operating system, some dating back to its 1984 launch, have held it back; and Microsoft's landgrab in the early 1990s while Apple dithered about licensing the operating system means that it now only has 3 to 5 per cent of the world's personal computer use. And without change that's always vulnerable to erosion by Microsoft as it updates and enhances Windows.

When Jobs rejoined Apple in 1996, he saw that by moving up to OS X, it could move beyond its narrow field and out into the expanding worlds of biosciences, film production, and even to encroach on high-end work such as web servers and entire businesses. It has been reinforcing that by a quiet series of acquisitions of high-end video and music software companies over the past couple of years, and the launch of the Xserve server earlier this year.

With OS X, it can even challenge Microsoft's Windows 2000, because Unix is the royalty of operating systems. Even DOS was an imperfect copy of Unix. Anything you want to do with a computer has probably been tried sometime with it. In the OS world, OS X also has that important extra: it gets buzz. Since midnight on Friday, Mac-heads around the world, including Britain, have been loading up their machines with new copies of the third version of OS X since it was launched in March 2001. Officially numbered 10.2, "Jaguar", as it's called, is bursting with new features and programs, able to hook up to and swap files with Windows systems without a qualm, but most of all faster, because it's based on better versions of the underlying code that runs the system.

It also comes with all the free tools and programs that are the stuff of life to Unix users: grep, awk, perl, vi, emacs, bash, MySQL, PHP, Apache. "Developers who use those tools to create the software we'll use in a few years are very interested," says Tim O'Reilly, head of the O'Reilly publishing group. He commented at a recent conference that "a lot of the things that the hackers and other alpha geeks have been incorporating into their lifestyle for some time – wireless, chat, web services, peer-to-peer (Rendezvous), etc – are all starting to show up in a nice package with OS X. So to me, this is a good predictor that Apple is really on the right track with some big trends." Software conferences nowadays abound with folk touting the greyish Apple Titanium PowerBooks. They're trendy, and unlike Linux you can get commercial productivity software – including Microsoft Office – for them.

Apple has also in the US been pushing hard to entice Windows PC users to move over on to OS X. Apple has everything to gain: with something between 3 and 5 per cent of the share of all desktops, if it can get even 1 per cent of Microsoft's users to convert, then its share will have increased by 20 to 33 per cent. The people proving hardest to persuade, though, are those who were Mac users before March 2001, when OS X (10.0) was introduced. At the Macworld New York conference in July, Jobs announced that 77 per cent of new Macs sold are running OS X. In July, there were two and a half million machines running OS X, and he expects that by the end of this year it will be five million. By then, he said, "20 per cent of the installed Mac base [will have] moved to Mac OS X. This is the fastest OS transition ever, whether you're talking about Apple or Windows."

Sure, but what about the other 20 million? For them it's a new user interface and new paradigm. Most important, it's more money – and not all the software they want is in place. OS X is powerful, and stable. But because it's an entirely different beast from its "classic" Mac precursor, anyone moving to it from the classic version must first buy the new operating system and then buy newer versions of commercial software.

There's an even bigger obstacle for publishing groups: Quark, which makes CopyDesk and Xpress, the two most widely-used sub-editing and layout programs in newspapers and magazines. Neither program has been updated to run "natively" in OS X; they will run, but in the "classic" version of the operating system alongside OS X. Effectively, the machine wastes horsepower unnecessarily running the OS X layer; Quark users might as well stick with the classic OS until 2003, when the OS X version – Quark 6 – is rumoured to be coming. But that will involve costly updates too. So most people don't bother. "Among my customers, I had one, a women's arts organisation, that wanted to run OS X," says Daniele Procida, who runs Apple Juice, a Cardiff-based company offering Apple support and products, with dozens of Mac clients. "They do web design, and work with Photoshop and Quark Xpress. They said they wanted to go to OS X because they said that's what colleges are using. But then they discovered that it wouldn't run natively and that they were going to have to learn a whole new operating system."

Procida says the problem is worst for people who have one Mac and are considering another. To them, Apple simply says: OS X is the future. There are rumours that from next year it will make it impossible to run new Macs only in "classic"; that OS X will be unremovable. Yet the message from those who've moved over is positive. Of OS X's user setup, which regulates what files you can install, one university administrator says "We're delighted with that facility. We can put Macs on people's desks and they can't mess them up."

For Jobs, who held a mock funeral for "classic" at the annual conference for Apple developers in May, that's the sort of message he'd like to hear more. But the corpse of "classic" isn't lying down just yet.

www.apple.com/macosx