Let the truth be known, I really do miss my Macintosh. I gave up my Mac a little more than a year ago when I developed a bad case of tendinitis; to save my hands, I started using Dragon Naturally Speaking, a continuous speech recognition system. While speech recognition software is available for the Mac, it doesn't have the power of Naturally Speaking.
So I was a bit curious when Apple Computer Inc. sent me a review copy of its newest operating system, MacOS 8.5. Seizing the opportunity, I decided to try it out with my friend Aaron, a Macintosh enthusiast.
Aaron and I tested MacOS 8.5 on a PowerPC 9600 with 64 megabytes of RAM and a 4-gigabyte hard drive. The system had an impressive load of applications, including PhotoShop, Microsoft Office, and a variety of Web publishing tools.
In many ways, MacOS 8.5 is Apple's first Internet release. Many Internet features that have until now only been available from third-party or shareware applications are now bundled into Apple's operating system. For example, the Date/Time control panel now allows you to automatically set the system date and time from a Network Time Server.
Meanwhile, the functionality of the infamous Macintosh Internet Config utility has been subsumed into a new Internet control panel.
The biggest Internet-savvy feature in MacOS 8.5 is Apple's new Sherlock search system. Previously called Find Files, Sherlock can be used to search for information three ways. First, you can search for all of the files that have a particular name. Next, you can index your hard drive and search for any file that contains a given keyword. Finally, you can turn Sherlock loose on the Internet and have it search via Web sites such as AltaVista, Hotbot, Excite, and Infoseek.
Macintosh users are positively enamored with Sherlock's features. Although companies like On Technology of Cambridge have sold hard-drive indexing tools in the past, most Mac users have never known that it exists. Now its built-in.
Despite these various improvements, however, there are still a lot of things that are frustrating about MacOS. The system is multitasking, which means that you can run more than one application at a time, but it still does not have preemptive multitasking, which means that one process can interrupt another.
What this means in layman's terms is that every now and then the Mac seems to lock up and become unresponsive. It hasn't crashed - it's simply doing something that can't be interrupted. This is most visible when applications are launching. Yes, MacOS 8.5 launches applications faster than MacOS 7.5 and possibly faster than 8.0, but while an application is launching, your system is basically unusable.
That's annoying for people like me who are constantly switching between applications. (I frequently browse the Web or read a few e-mail messages while a complicated application is starting up on my Windows machine.) Some programs, such as Apple's new Help Browser, are particularly bad offenders in this department.
Apple is calling MacOS 8.5 The Must-Have Upgrade. Unfortunately, a lot of current Apple users are locked out of the 8.5 experience. According to Apple, MacOS 8.5 requires a PowerPC computer with 16 megabytes of physical RAM and virtual memory set to at least 24 megabytes of RAM.
But I was unable to install it on a Performa 5300 computer that had 32 megabyes of RAM. Apple's upgrade software refused to update the operating system on the hard drive, and when we tried to boot from the CD-ROM and do a clean install, the installer crashed, complaining that the system didn't have enough memory.
You should also avoid installing MacOS 8.5 on Macintosh clones that were made by such companies as Power Computing, SuperMac, Motorola, and UMAX. Although these machines would run MacOS 8.0, Apple terminated the clone maker's MacOS license when it decided to jettison those annoying clone companies, which were making computers that were faster and cheaper than what Apple could produce.
Big warnings on the SuperMac Web site advise customers that if you try to install MacOS 8.5 on a non-Apple branded computer, you are doing so at your own risk.
Finally, Macintosh Web sites such as Macintouch and TidBits have also reported that some people have had their hard disks severely damaged upon installation of MacOS 8.5. This seems to affect less than 1 percent of all MacOS users - mostly people with non-Apple SCSI hard drives that are using third-party disk drives.
Indeed, MacOS 8.5 warns against installation if it detects you are using a non-Apple hard drive. This is just insanity on Apple's part, a cynical attempt to extort more money from the Macintosh-loving public. A hard disk is a hard disk, and Apple is the only company I know that has gimmicked its operating system to behave differently when run with hard drives that were purchased on the open market (where customers can typically save hundreds of dollars off the price charged by Mother Apple).
Overall, I see the advances in MacOS 8.5 as largely cosmetic, not revolutionary. With a selling price of $99 and guaranteed mass appeal, Apple is sure to make a lot of money on the product. But rather than working on glitz, I would rather see the company spend its R&D dollars on fixing the fundamental problems with the MacOS plumbing.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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