To be or not to be? As Copland slips further and further into the next millennium and Apple’s stock sinks, this is indeed the question.
When people ask me why I use a Mac, I have quite a few stock answers. They’re faster. They’re cheaper (a bald lie, but I say it nonetheless). As the argument nears its crescendo I point one sweeping hand to my PowerMac 7500 and rise to my feet: “Apple is and always will be at the forefront of innovation! Would you rather be using machines made by Taiwanese slave labor, installing card after card after card to keep up, or would you rather own a Mac?!” Instantly, my friends are converted. Their jaws drop in admiration.
Nevertheless, I’ve begun to suspect that I could be wrong. Is Apple at the forefront of innovation? How can a company that stubbornly hangs on to technologies like ADB and takes years to give its notebooks PC Card capability, be at the forefront of innovation? There’s no question — the Mac is a great machine, better than the PC not just in a technical way but in a philosophical one as well. While Microsoft adds feature after feature after feature — and then installs “Wizards” to manage them — Apple has always focused on elegance, on the uncluttered desktop without beveled windows and extra screen elements.
But the feeling which pervades the computing industry isn’t entirely misguided. Apple is losing its edge. Long gone are the days of the Macintosh IIfx, a machine that cost $18,000 but was the fastest desktop computer on the planet. I remember when I was the only person I knew with 16.7 million colors. Apple doesn’t produce cool stuff anymore. They produce marketable stuff, products that are so focused on the corporate customer that they seem stale to someone who remembers Apple as the company that put laser printing on the desktop.
The BeBox is an all new machine with an all new OS, built from scratch. It owes nothing to DOS, Windows, UNIX or the MacOS. Although the company describes BeOS as having been influenced by UNIX and the Mac, it’s the first all-native, fully multitasking operating system.
The lack of a hardware legacy makes the BeBox easy to program, and the demonstrations that Be’s been putting up around the country have convinced developers to give the new platform a try. CodeWarrior for the BeBox is in development now, and, if developers decide to take the plunge the BeOS could be a new — and perhaps dominant — force in the OS wars.
What does this all mean to Mac users? In the final analysis, it boils down to several things. First, Apple now faces truly cutthroat competition. The Mac market is one that sticks with the Mac not because it’s made by Apple per se, but because it’s willing to pay a premium and to be in the minority if it has the best machines available. What could be more on the cutting edge than the BeBox?
Apple’s going to have to push, more than they have so far, to get Copland out. Windows95 already has many of Copland’s features. The BeOS, which is reported to best both the Mac and Windows, ups the ante — Apple’s going to have to swim upstream to keep from falling into the growing pool of irrelevant technology companies. Because BeOS is written in almost entirely high-level code, it’s highly portable — there’s no plans for a Mac version, but it could still be in the cards. Since the BeBox is fully compliant with Apple’s Common Hardware Reference Platform, it could theoretically run the MacOS at some point in the future.
Finally, it means that there is an alternative. For game players, the BeBox represents a faster, easier, way cooler machine than what’s available now. For graphic designers, it represents a low-cost machine which does the work of today’s more expensive Macs. For tinkerers, it represents the first computer in a long while that’s made to be played with.
For all of us, it could mean that the wait is over.