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X Good 9 Bad

Entry 247, on 2005-11-09 at 10:41:58 (Rating 1, Computers)

It has been a while since I have used an older Mac computer running a system older than Mac OS X, but I needed to yesterday to copy some files onto a newer machine for someone who was finally upgrading. You tend to look back and think older systems had some merit, they did the job and didn't require too much memory, etc. That is true, but we sometimes overlook the bad things and I think we are spoiled now with the incredible stability of Mac OS X.

In the 10 minutes I was using this older machine it crashed twice and had to be restarted. I used Macs for 15 years before Mac OS X and I know that this frequency of crashing isn't typical, but it did remind me how lucky we are now to have an OS as stable as Mac OS X. The statement "Mac OS X never crashes" isn't entirely true, but it is close enough to being accurate that it can be used as a close approximation to reality.

My friends in the Windows world also enjoy better stability with Windows XP, but that only seems to happen for experts who can keep the system patched, and even then the stability is inferior to Mac OS X. Having a computer system you can have confidence in is a great thing. Instead of worrying about making extra copies of projects and avoiding doing things which might cause crashes, we can get on with doing cool things on our modern Macs.

So while I agree that Mac OS X's beauty, flexibility, and power are all important, I think the stability of the core operating system is maybe the greatest attraction to power users. The problem is we need a journey into the past through a few Mac OS 9 crashes to remind us how lucky we now are!

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