Depressing
Buzz Andersen, John Gruber, Chris Nandor, Ryan Wilcox, and others are saying that Apple should fix bugs in OS X before adding features. I find the fact that these people agree with me on this strangely depressing. Since I tend to be hyper-sensitive about these issues, I’ve had a lingering hope that the problems weren’t really that bad. It’s fading.
Matt Deatherage’s column in the June Macworld posits that the OS X migration is going slowly because of NeXT hubris. On the face of it, this seems impossible. Are the Apple menu, pop-up windows, and all the rest really that big a deal? I’ve written type and creator good, file extensions bad more times than I care to remember, yet I’m sitting here using OS X. Others have yet to switch (it’s more of a switch than an upgrade), and yet most of them probably have no idea what HFS metadata is.
Maybe all the changes and bugs add up to a death of a thousand strings, altering the gestalt of the system. Or maybe late adopters aren’t switching because they don’t want to upgrade all their software and buy not-so-speedy new hardware just to make OS X’s speed tolerable. Whatever the reason, the transition is going slowly. Accelerating it is probably the best thing Apple can do for itself, its developers, and ultimately its users.
