Understand, this was not a step taken lightly. I'm a committed anti-Luddite, so firmly in favor of progress that I get a twinge of anxiety whenever I have to use a pen and paper instead of a Palm or keyboard. And I'm not saying the OS X-ile is permanent; once Apple tweaks the system (as expected this fall) and more companies produce X-specific software, I will probably revisit the new code. But for the foreseeable future, it just ain't worth the vein-popping pain.
My grievances with the system all have one basic cause: the arrogance of Apple. This is a company that assumes its fiercely loyal consumer base will gladly suffer any hardship when upgrading; it has a big problem with backwards compatibility and a maddening inability to stop fiddling with features. Many Mac owners still fondly remember the days when you could connect two machines with a simple Apple Talk cable, and shudder at the memory of the abortive hockey-puck mouse.
Installing OS X is like being dropped into Bizarro world. Everything's been changed around — sometimes, it seems, just for the sake of it — and you have to make the best of unfamiliar terrain. Nearly all the old control panels have been wiped out. Key commands no longer mean the same thing (to make a folder alias, you once pressed command-m; now, inexplicably, it's command-l). The trash can has left the desktop. And I could never get used to shutting down from the Apple menu.
Except with OS X, you are never, ever meant to shut down. That's right, Apple has designed this system to be left on all the time, going to sleep when not needed and popping back up again the second you want its attention. It's nice in theory, but this Doctrine of the Infallible, Everlasting Mac kind of ignores the way human beings use computers.
Laptops run out of juice. Desktops get unplugged from walls. Powercuts happen (the Apple guys, who work near rolling-blackout-prone San Jose, really should know that). And every time you do endure a restart, you have to wait an eternity for OS X to launch the "classic" environment, which it has to do any time you launch a program made prior to OS X (so far, pretty much everything).
All this I could put up with. But the main draw of OS X is supposed to be how supremely stable it is, which is something I started to doubt when I woke it from sleep one night to copy something onto a Zip drive. The moment I inserted the disk, horrific white-on-black letters started spraying across the screen. It was a crash; worse, it was a PC-style crash.
Mac owners are supposed to never have to live in fear of the blinking C:/ prompt; that's a PC problem, a reminder that all Wintel machines are built on the terrifyingly unfriendly foundation of DOS code. But now OS X is built on the foundation of Unix. All well and good for stability's sake, but having to answer the question "retry, abort, fail?" on a Mac somehow sucks seventeen years' worth of magic out of the machine.
It's as if the Mac desktop suddenly fell away to reveal the face of Big Brother from the 1984 commercial.
The final straw came when I simply could not do something I desperately need to do for my work: set up a computer-to-computer wireless network over Airport, so I could swap my writing across different machines. I do it all the time in OS 9; with at least four Macs in the house, it's an indispensible feature. Apple explained this could not be done in OS X without dialing into a wireless Internet connection, which my ISP does not support. In any case, why should anyone have to dial up — still a little bit of a hassle for the majority of us who don't have always-on broadband connections — in order to wirelessly access a computer sitting in the next room?
Frustrated and feeling the loss of the control panels that would have made it work, I decided OS X's time was up. Reinstalling OS 9 felt like coming home. But it came with a sobering thought: Will I have to go through this kind of thing again, but on the PC this time, when I install the final version of Windows XP? Even worse, what if it's plain sailing with Windows XP? I might start liking PCs more than Macs.
Now that really does make me seasick.