September 25, 2002
He Can't Do That!Michael Swaine
The recent announcement that, beginning in January 2003, new Macs will no longer boot OS 9 caused an outcry among the Mac faithful. Michael Swaine wonders just which faithful we're talking about.
He Can't Do That!
He can't do that!
That was the immediate, loud, and angry reaction of many who read the recent announcement that, starting January 2003, new Macs will not be able to boot OS 9. They will be able to run OS 9 applications in Classic mode (for how long, one wonders), but they won't be able to run OS 9 solo.
I'm not sure how many of these unhappy folks there are, it being too easy to hear in the decibel level of the outcry an exaggeration of the numerosity of the outcriers, but I know who they are. They are the true believers. The Rest of Us. The loyal Mac users.
These users are so loyal that they are still using the first Mac they ever bought. Or maybe the second or the third, but the point is that even if it's the third, they don't contemplate a fourth. They are happy with that Mac. They are happy with the software that came with it, or the few applications that they bought with their pinched pennies over the years. Or acquired in some manner. They would be happy never to have to buy another computer or another piece of software for the rest of their lives. They are that loyal.
You can imagine how much weight Steve Jobs gives to the opinions of these loyal users.
Especially since they are so well informed.
Yes, Steve Jobs will come into our homes and offices in the middle of the night and rewire our computers so that they won't boot into OS 9 any more. You bet. On midnight, December 31, he will come down the chimney like an un-Santa delivering un-presents to turn our lives so meaningless and bleak that the only way we can imagine making existence tolerable again is by buying OS X, version 10.3. And maybe an Airport card. In the morning our keyboards will lock up, our applications will freeze, and our HyperCard stacks will come unstacked.
I think that some people have lingered too long in the range of Steve's famous Reality-Distortion Field. They have come to believe that he has superhuman powers. All right, he does have superhuman powers, but the announcement was about new hardware, not about the computers in our homes and offices. Those machines will still be able to run the operating system version and the applications that they are running now. Forever.
And there is nothing wrong with that. There are people who never accepted Microsoft Windows when it came along, and are still running 1980s-vintage DOS on their 640K PCs. Not to mention those Apple II diehards, bless 'em. Integer Basic forever. Keep the cat hair out of the drive slots, and with a little luck you can keep those old machines running forever. And run your so-called obsolete software on them. You can do that, and it doesn't make you a bad person.
It does tend to take you off the radar screen, though. The downside of climbing out of the computer customer pool is that you have no influence on the decisions of the computer companies. They will ignore you. And there's nothing wrong with that, either. As the Switch campaign indicates, Jobs and company see more hope of convincing Windows consumers to switch to Mac than of converting loyal non-buyers into buyers. Jobs might be wrong, although I doubt it, but the only way to convince him would be to buy something.
For those who still do that sort of thing, the Apple announcement has some interesting implications.
For example, doesn't the announcement imply that Apple will release at least one new Mac model in January 2003? Otherwise the specification of the date is pointless. On the assumption that this was an implicit preannouncement of new hardware, we can all speculate for the next four months about the specs. What fun.
And what new technologies can we expect from Apple as it frees up engineers from OS 9 development and support? Apple's pool of engineers is finite, and as the company moves from being a two-operating system supplier to a one-operating system supplier, it will be able to do more interesting stuff more quickly. That's surely something to look forward to, if you're into looking forward.
If you're not, don't worry. Steve is not going to disable OS 9 in your Mac.
He can't do that.
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