Will Tyler
Of all Apple Computer’s troubles in recent years, the problem that has proved most difficult to solve is how to replace its ageing flagship, the Macintosh operating system (OS).
Two previous attempts have failed. Earlier this month, at the Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder and interim CEO, revealed the latest plan.
The current MacOS, version 8, was launched last year. However it lacks two key features that rivals such as Microsoft’s Windows 95 and NT have. The most important is memory protection, which prevents a misbehaving program from causing other programs – or the whole system – to crash.
MacOS 8 also lacks pre-emptive multi- tasking, which allows a user to smoothly run many programs simultaneously.
Apple’s awareness of these weaknesses catalysed its work on Copland, a completely new operating system intended to supersede MacOS.
In 1996, the company realised Copland was nowhere near completion, and abandoned it. Knowing it needed a new OS quickly, Apple went shopping for technology to build one. It bought NeXT, a software company founded by Jobs when he left Apple in 1985.
Much of Apple’s turnaround, since Jobs was rehired as a consultant last July, is a result of his innovative business sense. He’s reduced Apple’s product line to just four machines. There’s a desktop and a portable machine customised for distinct consumer and professional markets.
The first machine, a desktop aimed at professionals, the Power Mac G3, was an immediate hit when it was released in November – selling more than 500 000 units to make it Apple’s fastest-selling computer ever. Its companion product, the portable PowerBook G3, was released to equally rave reviews.
The Motorola G3 microprocessor -the “brain” of both these machines – has been rated by Apple and a variety of computer magazines as twice as fast as a comparable Pentium chip.
It’s also the powerhouse at the heart of the recently released consumer machine – the funkily designed, one-piece iMac in a cool platinum, aquamarine and translucent case.
“We have brought romance and innovation back into the industry,” boasted Jobs, a man not known for understatement. “iMac reminds everyone of what Apple stands for.” He says it combines “the excitement of the Internet with the simplicity of the Mac”.
The iMac features the G3 processor running at 233 megahertz, and comes with 32 megabytes of memory, a four-gigabyte hard disk, a built-in 15-inch colour screen, a CD-Rom drive, and surround sound. It should be available by the end of August for about R11 000.
The machine also includes a universal serial bus (USB), the new “killer” hardware device – also a Microsoft Windows 98 feature – that allows almost any other hardware device to run through it.
The consumer machine’s only flaw may be its lack of a floppy drive for removing and storing data, although a plug-in USB floppy drive has been announced by Panasonic. This, however, seems like an ugly solution for such a style-conscious product.
While planning the machines last year, Apple still needed a new operating system, so NeXT’s OpenSTEP technology was incorporated into a new system called Rhapsody, announced at last year’s Developer Conference.
However, unlike Mac-OS, Rhapsody is based on Unix, the high-powered operating system that is used to run large networks and databases.
A Mac program would have to be completely rewritten to run on it, and developers have been very reluctant to do this, because it involves as much effort as rewriting for, say, Windows NT, which has a much larger market share.
Apple’s new strategy is intended to make it simple for software developers to convert existing Mac applications to the new OS. MacOS X (pronounced “ten”) will be based on Rhapsody, and still be Unix derived, but will use an existing set of Mac OS components that can offer the advanced features such as protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking.
This means that most current Mac programs should require only a light “tune-up” to run on MacOS X.
Along with Adobe, Microsoft and Macromedia have said they will support MacOS X. Programs written for MacOS X will run on MacOS 8, but without the advanced features.
A beta release of MacOS X is due early next year, ahead of its public release later in 1999.
In the meantime, Apple will ship MacOS 8.5 later this year, introducing some of MacOS X’s new features; Rhapsody will be kept for servers and software development.
If MacOS X works, it should combine the flexibility of Unix with the ease of MacOS. But this is a tight schedule for an ambitious project, and Apple has missed deadlines before. At least this time it has the support of software developers, something that Copland and Rhapsody lacked.
And all the operating system and hardware innovations seem to be working. Last month Jobs announced the company’s first back- to-back profitable quarters since 1995.