I'm writing this opinion piece on the eve of perhaps Apple's most hyped MacWorld Expo ever. TIME Canada has already pre-released an article about the next-generation flat-panel iMac machines, complete with
pictures of the it, its industrial designer and Apple CEO Steve Jobs. While the complete picture has yet to be painted (and will be in the morning when Jobs reveals the specifications during his keynote speech), I'm starting to believe that Apple feels that "innovation" and "revolution" are a matter of hardware and user interface aesthetics. Where Apple used to pave the way for new technologies, programming methodologies and user interfaces, they remain stuck in a rut of their own creation, bound to re-create a lot of the same mistakes that caused them to lose the majority of their market share and relevance to Microsoft in the 1990's. E-I-C's note: The article was written before the actual MacWorld Keynote took place.Apple's much-hyped and late-arriving Mac OS X hybrid operating system is only as "advanced" and "modern" as the sum of its different yet integrated parts. UNIX kernel-based operating systems have been around since the late 1960's; the Amiga personal computer was endowed with protected memory and preemptive multitasking capabilities in 1986. "Carbon," the refurbished classic Mac Toolbox API still is not re-entrant nor thread-safe, nor is "Cocoa," the re-tooled Objective-C-based NeXTstep API. Both frameworks have 15 years of baggage and compromises, compete with each other at the functional level, have differing designs and conventions and have relatively steep learning curves. All of this history is haphazardly glazed over with "Aqua," a translucent, photo-realistic, memory-hungry and performance-challenged rendition of the desktop interface Apple pioneered in the late 1980's, although it lacks much of the convenience and consistency that were the basis of its original design.
A company called Be appeared on the landscape in the early 1990's, and succeeded in building from scratch a technologically superior operating system that vastly outperforms Apple's operating systems on Apple and Intel-based hardware. Through many years of iteration, several generations of software development teams, and several re-writes of their own core operating system components, Be succeeded in achieving most of the goals that Apple has still failed to realize with Mac OS X. BeOS's high-performance kernel and media subsystem is able to schedule low-latency audio and video threads while incurring very low processor utilization and allows for several audio and video streams to be played or processed simultaneously without skipping a beat or dropping frames. OS X still struggles at this task. Be's high-performance, attributed, multithreaded, journaled 64-bit file system BFS provided users with lightning-fast database-like file queries, excellent protection against disk corruption caused by power or software failure, node-level change notification, and an impressive system boot time that averages 10-15 seconds from power-on to a usable desktop. Mac OS X is burdened by historical file systems that routinely suffer structural integrity failure, yield poor file search performance, have limited metadata and attribute support that is inconsistently implemented across the "Carbon" and "Cocoa" frameworks, leaving Apple to follow Microsoft's lead by requiring files to have filename suffixes to accomplish mapping file formats to their supporting applications. Mac OS X boots in over a minute on Apple's fastest machines, and the Finder is required to poll the file system for changes that occur.
