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Installation

The first step in deciding whether this is the right time to upgrade is to look at whether your Mac is supported. Apple claims that OS X can be used by any G3 or G4 Mac with at least 128Mb RAM, with the exception of the original PowerBook G3. On a 400MHz iMac, for instance, the performance of OS X proved to be more than acceptable and, with the price of memory at an all-time low, there's little reason for anyone to have less than 192Mb in a modern machine.

If you have an older machine, at the moment you're plain out of luck. Some upgrade card vendors are planning to add support for OS X to their products, but this isn't expected to arrive for a few weeks at least. And how effective it will prove to be in the long run isn't yet known.

But having a machine that's capable of running OS X isn't the end of the story. Because it's a radically different operating system, you need to ensure that all of the peripherals you use can be used with it - just because it works with OS 9 doesn't mean it'll work with OS X, as the drivers required are completely different.

A reasonable number of peripherals will work out of the box with OS X, including keyboards and mice from a wide range of manufacturers, SCSI cards from Adaptec and others, and the majority of FireWire and USB external hard drives. Printers are also fairly well covered, such as the most recent models from Epson and HP, and there's direct support for some still and DV cameras as well. There's no support for playing DVDs, although a DVD drive will read CD-ROMs, but AirPort is supported in the released version. The lack of support for synchronising Palm handhelds, and CD-RW burning will be significant for many users.

Otherwise, you'll have to rely on peripheral makers to update their drivers to support OS X, and it's likely that quite a lot of older hardware will never get an update. This means that if you rely on a particular old piece of hardware you're either going to have to stick with OS 9, or scrap the hardware and buy new.

The installation process itself proved to be relatively straightforward, as long as you've already updated your Mac to OS 9.1. According to the installer, you can install OS 9.1 after OS X

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has completed, but we found this to be a much more complicated, and less reliable, process than simply updating to OS 9.1 first. However, you don't have to install OS X on a separate partition if you want to be able to boot back into a 'pure' OS 9.1 system later on - both operating systems can co-exist on the same drive and partition.

The Interface

The OS X issue that has divided the Mac-using community more than any other has been Aqua - the new user interface. After a storm of protest that the interface was too radically different from OS 9, Steve Jobs announced in January that certain features - most notably the Apple menu - would return in a new and updated Aqua.

The final product largely succeeds in the compromises made towards familiarity, while being considerably easier to use for new computer users and anyone who's not familiar with the Mac OS. The new Apple menu features familiar items like System Preferences (effectively replacing the Control Panels), Location Manager (renamed simply Location), and recently used applications and documents. However, the content of the Apple menu is effectively fixed - there's no simple way for a user to modify it.

To compensate for this loss, Apple has added features to the Dock (the home of all running applications, open documents and various shortcuts) that lives at the bottom of the screen. The Dock can now have pop-up menus in it, so you can place your hard drive in it, for instance, and have a pop up menu of its contents, and can mirror some Control Strip functions, such as changing display resolution. Hard drives can also be mounted on the Desktop, and files can be viewed in a more Mac-like way, with a new window opening when you double-click on a folder. There's also a multi-paned browser view that allows you to navigate deep complex folder hierarchies easily, as well as a list view.

Finder windows can have a toolbar along the top that allows you to have direct access to buttons for changing views, going back, and for going to your home folder, favourites, or applications. Thankfully, this is now customisable, so you can place any file, application, or folder there, along with some of the System Preferences.

The overall look of the interface is sleek and modern, and certainly way ahead of anything in the Windows world. Despite this, for anyone coming from Windows the basic movements around the screen - going to the bottom to switch applications, for example - will be familiar. Apple has added a thoroughly professional, great looking sheen to an interface that adopts the best bits from both the Mac and Windows.

OS X review part 2 - applications and conclusions

The full version of this review will appear in MacUser issue 7 on 6 April.