Five years of Mac OS X

The road behind

Mac OS X 10.0 was released five years ago today, on March 24th, 2001. To me, it felt like the end of a long road rather than a beginning. At that point, I’d already written over 100,000 words about Apple’s new OS for Ars Technica, starting with the second developer release and culminating in the public beta several months before 10.0. But the road that led to Mac OS X extends much farther into past—years, in fact.

Mac OS X 10.0 was the end of many things. First and foremost, it was the end of one of the most drawn-out, heart-wrenching death spirals in the history of the technology sector. Historians (and Wall Street) may say that it was the iMac, with its fresh, daring industrial design, that marked the turning point for Apple. But that iMac was merely a stay of execution at best, and a last, desperate gasp at worst. By the turn of the century, Apple needed a new OS, and it needed one badly. No amount of translucent plastic was going to change that.

Apple was so desperate for a solution to its OS problem in the mid- to late 1990s that both Solaris and Windows NT were considered as possible foundations for the next-generation Mac OS. And even these grim options represented the end of a longer succession of abortive attempts at technological rejuvenation: OpenDoc, QuickDraw 3D, QuickDraw GX, Taligent, Pink, Copland, Gershwin, Dylan—truly, a trail of tears. (If you can read that list without flinching, turn in your Apple Extended Keyboard II and your old-school Mac cred.)

In retrospect, it seems almost ridiculously implausible that Apple’s prodigal son, thrown out of the company in 1985, would spend the next twelve years toiling away in relative obscurity on technology that would literally save the company upon his return. (Oh, and he also converted an orphaned visual effects technology lab into the most powerful animation studio in the US—in his spare time, one presumes.)

So yes, Mac OS X marked the end of a dark time in Apple’s history, but it was also the end of a decade of unprecedented progress and innovation. In my lifetime, I doubt I will ever experience a technological event that is both as transformative and as abrupt as the introduction of the Macintosh. Literally overnight, a generation of computer users went from a black screen with fuzzy green text and an insistently blinking cursor to crisp, black text on a white background, windows, icons, buttons, scrollbars, menus, and this crazy thing called a “mouse.”

I see a lot more Mac users today than I ever saw in the pre-Mac OS X era, but few of them remember what it was like in the beginning. They’ve never argued with someone who’s insisted that “only toy computers have a mouse.” They didn’t spend years trying to figure out why the world stuck with MS-DOS while they were literally living in the future. They never played the maze. (Dagnabbit!)

Today’s Mac users appreciate the refinement, the elegance, the nuances of Mac OS X. Today, the Mac grows on people. It seeps into their consciousness until they either break down and buy one or retreat to familiarity, perhaps to be tempted again later.

The original Mac users had a very different experience. Back then, the Mac wasn’t a seductive whisper; it was a bolt of lightning, a wake-up call, a goddamn slap in the face. “Holy crap! This is it!” Like I said, transformative. For the rest of the computing world, that revelatory moment was paced out over an entire decade. The experience was diluted, and the people were transformed slowly, imperceptibly.

That era ended on March 24th, 2001. Mac OS X 10.0 was the capstone on the Mac-That-Was. It was the end of the ride for the original Mac users. In many ways, it was the end of the Mac. In the subsequent five years (and over 200,000 more words here at Ars), the old world of the Mac has faded into the distance. With it, so have many of the original Mac users. Some have even passed on. Mac OS X 10.0 had a message: the Mac is dead.

Long live the Mac

Mac OS X arose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Mac-That-Was. Okay, maybe more like an injured phoenix. Also, Apple didn’t light the bird on fire until a few years later. But still, technically, phoenix-like.

A side-by-side test-drive of Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.4 is shocking. The eternal debate is whether this gap exists because 10.4 is so good, or because 10.0 was so, so bad. That said, Apple’s ability to plan and execute its OS strategy is not open for debate. In five short years, Apple has essentially created an entirely new platform. Oh, I know, it’s really just the foundation of NeXT combined with the wreckage of classic Mac OS, but I think that makes it even more impressive. Two failing, marginalized platforms have combined to become the platform for the alpha geeks in the new century.

Today’s Mac users span a much wider range than those of the past. Mac OS X’s Unix-like core reached out to the beard-and-suspenders crowd (and the newer source-code-and-a-dream crowd) while the luscious Aqua user interface pulled all the touchy-feely aesthetes from the other direction. In the middle were the refugees from the Mac-That-Was, but they aren’t the story here. Mac OS X is about new blood and new ideas—some good, some bad, but all vibrant. The Mac is alive again!

After spending half my life watching smart, talented people ignore the Mac for reasons of circumstance or prejudice, it’s incredibly gratifying to live in a post-Mac OS X world. When I encounter a tech-world luminary or up-and-coming geek today, I just assume that he or she uses a Mac. Most of the time, I’m right. Even those with a conflicting affiliation (e.g., Linux enthusiasts) often use Apple laptops, if not the OS.

In the media, the Mac and Apple have gone from depressing headlines on the business page to gushing feature stories everywhere. Even traditional strongholds of other platforms have fallen under the translucent fist of Mac OS X. Just look at Slashdot, long a haven for Linux topics, now nearly living up to the frequent accusation that it’s become “an Apple news site.” Here at Ars Technica, the story is similar. The “PC Enthusiast’s Resource” from 1999 is now absolutely swimming in Apple-related content.

As much as I like to think that I brought on this transformation here at Ars with my avalanche of words, the truth is that Mac OS X is responsible. Yes, Apple’s shiny hardware helped, but it was the software that finally won over those stubborn PC geeks. It helped that the software was shiny too, but it would have all been for nothing if not for one word: respect.

Mac OS X made the alpha geeks respect the Mac. My part, if any, in the transformation of a green-on-black den of PC users into a clean, well-lighted home for Apple news and reviews was merely to explain what Mac OS X is, where it’s coming from, and where it appears to be going. The rest followed naturally. It’s Unix. It’s a Mac. It’s pretty, stable, novel, innovative, and different. Mac OS X was powerful geeknip; it still is.