Thinking Too Different: Why Mac Users Are Slow to Adopt OS
X
Daniel Knight - 2003.06.03
I worked at a local publishing house for 8-1/2 years, first as a
book designer doing Mac support on the side, later as the IS Manager
doing book design on the side. By the time I left that job, we had 90+
Macs in three locations.
I was also helping put together a proposal for a Citrix system,
which would let us move parts of the company to Windows, which the head
of our marketing department was convinced was an essential step in
functioning in the real world of business. (Needless to say, I
completely opposed this.) I left long before that was implemented, and
I'm glad I don't have to deal with viruses, worms, sluggishness, and
other problems associated with running Windows from a shared
server.
In my opinion, that's absolutely the wrong model for personal
computing. It's the old mainframe and minicomputer model that
essentially uses terminals tied to a central computer that does all the
real work. Citrix and other solutions for sharing Windows on a server
work much the same way, although the display processing can be handled
by the client computer.
Pournelle's First Law of Computing is "at least one CPU per user."
That is, every computer user should have a computer that does the work
instead of tying into a shared application server that does the bulk of
the work. Sharing files on a server, sharing a database over a network,
and occasionally running an application on a remote server is okay, but
the core of the personal computing paradigm is that the power is on
your desktop.
Unix, which forms the core of Mac OS X, is rooted in the server
mentality. It's designed from the ground up to support multiple users
and never crash. That's why OS X users have to log into their
computers, something that was never necessary with the classic Mac OS.
(Yes, Apple had some multiuser support in the classic Mac OS, but
nothing as powerful as OS X offers.)
The best thing that ever happened to Unix was being liberated from
the Big Computer, put on a Personal Computer, and getting a graphical user interface. Fifteen years
ago, Steve Jobs unveiled the NeXT
computer to the world as one of the first personal computers to run
Unix and include a graphical user interface.
This was the era of Windows 2.0, and NeXT was deliberately designed
to compete with the four year old Mac OS. A lot of things were done
differently. Sometimes that was to improve things. Sometimes that was
to make it hook into Unix more easily. And sometimes is was to be
different, to try something new, to experiment with the user
interface.
Mac OS X
That's the background for Mac OS X. When Apple acquired NeXT in late
1996, they acquired a mature operating system that had evolved
separately from both Windows and the Mac OS. It took nearly four years
to port NeXTstep over to the PowerPC and get the classic environment
running within OS X.
The beta, released in September 2000, held a lot of promise and
created a lot of frustration. It was rock solid, but it didn't work
with a lot of third-party hardware, and there was very little software
available for it. Worse yet, it broke a lot of Macintosh Human
Interface Guidelines, forcing Mac users to learn new ways to do
familiar tasks.
When 10.0 shipped in March 2001, Apple showed that they had heard
our complaints. The useless Apple icon in the middle of the menu bar
was back where it belonged. There was a bit more hardware support. And
with six months of the Public Beta, there was a lot more software
available.
But it still had a lot of rough edges. It was stable. It was pretty.
It was sluggish. And it remained very different from the classic Mac
OS.
Through 10.1 and 10.2, things got better. We now have lots of native
OS X programs to choose from. Quartz Extreme attacks sluggishness
on the interface front, which is where it was especially pronounced. A
lot more classic Mac features have made their way into OS X - and
it remains very different from the classic Mac OS.
Forward or Backward?
Four members of my household now have OS X on their computers.
I pretty much live in OS X on my 400 MHz
PowerBook G4, and with the exception of uploading site changes
within Claris Home Page, I find classic applications (which I use for
most of my work) sometimes work better inside OS X and the classic
environment than they did under OS 9. (I attribute much of this to
the fact that OS X uses as much free memory as it can for caching
files.) I've been an OS X users, not just a dabbler, since I got a
copy of 10.2 in January 2003.
Rant the First
My wife's 14" iBook 600 came with
10.1 when she bought it in early 2002. And it should be easy for her to
migrate, since she does almost all of her work in AppleWorks, MYOB
Account Edge, browsers, and instant messengers, all of which are X
native. She still loves Claris Emailer, though, so she'll probably be
using classic mode for at least that if she ever makes the switch to
OS X.
I don't think that's going to happen soon. Linda has been using Macs
since my Mac Plus days. She's become
familiar with how it works and comfortable with the classic Mac OS. Her
'Book rarely locks up under OS 9, and she's got everything working
just so. There's no compelling reason to migrate to OS X.
There could be. She runs a small adoption agency, two of her
employees work from their homes, and iCal could make it a lot easier to
check each other's schedules. All of her Macs (two 366 MHz indigo iBooks, her 14" iBook, and a
333 MHz blueberry iMac) have enough
horsepower and RAM (192 MB and up) to handle Jaguar, which is required
to run iCal.
Every few months she'll try to use OS X for a day, just as I did
last year. But she's not a geek; she's a user. She doesn't follow the
Mac Web to learn about getting the most out of her computer. She
doesn't sit down with massive tomes explaining the intricacies of
OS X. She's a user, and the Mac has never required here to do much
more than use it.
She knows how to use the Chooser, but where the heck do you choose
your printer in OS X? And how the heck do you connect to the file
server? Both are much harder to figure out in OS X - I've been
using X full time since January, and I still find it hard to remember
where some of these settings are. And I'm the family Mac geek.
She likes Safari, which she used for the first time on Saturday. She
can run Yahoo Messenger. But then comes the frustration. AppleWorks
didn't know where her user dictionary was, and we spent 20 minutes
figuring out where it was so she could use it. This is exactly the same
user dictionary that AppleWorks used in the classic Mac OS. Why can't
it automatically use the same dictionary? And why does it keep
displaying that blasted "Starting Point" thing despite the fact she's
turned it off time after time?
Fonts are the next problem. There are probably some font conflicts,
but I can't find a freeware or shareware program to help me diagnose
it. But some of her fonts didn't work until I deleted some other
(unneeded) ones. And the font that she uses for all of her business
documents, Sabon, doesn't work at all inside OS X - yet it works
flawlessly on my computer.
Rant the Second
The other drawback is that she's a Tournament Director in our online
euchre league, and some of the features of Yahoo Messenger are only
accessible to Windows users. So she uses Virtual PC, and the version we
have isn't compatible with OS X. Since Yahoo doesn't seem to care
about feature parity for Mac users, that means booting into the classic
Mac OS any time you need to use the more advanced Yahoo Messenger
features.
Of course, both classic Mac OS users and OS X users are treated
as second class citizens in the world of Yahoo Messenger. We get the
basics (chat, webcams) but not the powerful stuff (URLs that work,
sending a message to a whole group, voice chat, and automatic message
archiving).
(Yeah, I know about Fire. It was one of the first
OS X applications I downloaded when playing with the Public Beta. I
like it, and Linda's going to try it. It doesn't support her webcam,
but it does message archiving and some other useful things.)
Rant the Third
And then she tried to save a document. Do the folks at Apple have
any clue how unnerving it can be to go to their stark Save dialogue box
- especially for someone who has been living with the power of Default Folder
on the classic Mac OS for years?
There's not even a list of files within the currently selected
folder - except for a place to name your file, this is pretty alien
looking to the typical Mac user. And clicking on Where: Documents isn't
particularly helpful. The options are Desktop, Home (where's that?),
iDisk, Favorite Places, and Recent Places. The latter two list
additional directories.
Expanding the Save dialogue isn't a whole lot more helpful to
someone used to the classic Mac OS. It looks like this:
This may have been a logical way for geeks and NeXT programmers to
list files and folders, but it's completely alien to Mac users. Not
only does it look strange, but if you're not careful, you can suddenly
end up in the wrong directory. This is abominable. We complained about
this in the beta; three major revisions later it's still the
default.
Contrast that with the save dialogue in the classic Mac OS. It's
stark in its simplicity, yet it's also powerful:
We're in a folder named art. By clicking on the name of the folder,
we can zip up through the hierarchy of directories right to the
desktop. By scrolling through the list of files, we can choose any
folder within the current directory. Even the additional power added by
Default Folder (those four icons near the top right) doesn't detract
from the simplicity of the interface while adding incredible power.
I tried Default
Folder X several months ago, and I used the demo until it
expired. At the time I was still doing the bulk of my work in classic
applications, so I was rarely subjected to the OS X Save dialogue.
Maybe if I learn exactly how the Favorites feature of OS X works,
I'll find out that I don't need Default Folder X, but I suspect it will
become as essential to productive OS X work as the classic Default
Folder is with the classic Mac OS.
This is just another example of Apple ruining a perfectly usable,
easily understood interface in exchange for something more powerful and
more complex that can readily confuse and intimidate longtime Mac
users.
Although there have been a lot of improvements in wheels over the
years, the shape remains the same. The elegance of the classic Mac OS
is much the same; I cannot understand why Apple thought they had to put
flashy rims and wide tires on the family minivan.
The Beige G3
My youngest son, Tim, uses a beige
G3/266 upgraded with a 333 MHz CPU - and I haven't tried chipping
it to 366 or 400 MHz yet. Tim goes back and forth between 9 and X. His
home schooling curriculum is Windows based, so he's got to use
OS 9 and Virtual PC there. Other than that, he prefers OS X.
He's got Jaguar, Yahoo Messenger, AppleWorks, and probably some game
emulators as well.
I spent several hours on it over the weekend, trying to figure out
how to partition the 20 GB Barracuda drive properly, move OS X
over using Carbon Copy Cloner, and free up the 30 GB IBM DeskStar for
the iMac 333 in my second son's room.
With or without the Acard Ahard, we were unable to get things working
as we wanted, so we left the DeskStar connected to the G3's 16.67 MBps
IDE bus and removed the Seagate Barracuda.
Running a 17" monitor at 1024 x 768, Tim's pretty happy with this
setup. He doesn't print much, but we have everything set up for the
LaserJet 2100TN.
Newest: The iMac 333
The goal was to put the newer, larger, faster IBM DeskStar in the
iMac 333, but the path of least resistance was not to do so. Instead we
ripped open our famous iMac, the one that refuses to acknowledge the
same 256 MB module that works in another iMac 333 and a WallStreet, and
did some upgrades.
We replaced the bottom RAM chip, which is a bear to get at, giving
it 128 MB down there. It still wouldn't work with the 256 MB module up
top, so we ended up putting a 64 MB module (pulled from the WallStreet
when it got a 256 megger) on top for a total 192 MB. A bit tight for
OS X, but a world better than the 64 MB Brian had been using.
Then we pulled the stock 6 GB hard drive and dropped in the 20 GB
Barracuda, which we partitioned into thirds. Each 6.6 GB partition was
to hold a different OS: OS X on the first, OS 9 on the
second, and eventually Yellow Dog Linux on the third.
As with the beige G3, things didn't work as planned. We can boot
OS 9 from the first partition, but not from the second. So now
Brian has OS 9.2.2 and Jaguar on his first partition. I would have made
it bigger if we'd known we'd run into this.
Brian just graduated high school, hopes to buy an iBook before
starting college in the fall, and wants to get comfortable with
OS X. He's used it on my TiBook (both Brian and Steve love to burn
CDs, and I have one of two CD-RW drives in the house), and now he's got
it in his bedroom.
Like my wife, he's mostly dabbled in OS X thus far. He's more of a
geek than she it, but far less than me. He's been downloading updaters
and programs, and he's been griping about how sluggish OS X is
compared with OS 9. He already knows that one reason he'll be
buying an iBook is that he's so comfortable in OS 9 that he sees
no reason to change - but he also wants to be ready for the future.
I still don't have a clue why we can't boot from the second
partition. I hope we won't have problems with YDL when Brian gets it.
This was an unexpected frustration.
Why Mac Users Aren't Switching
Over the past week the Mac Web has been busy asking the question,
"Why aren't Mac users moving to OS X?" Some of the suggestions are
sensible; a few seem pure nonsense. It took me a year, and watching my
family get familiar with OS X brings back a lot of memories.
In my opinion, the top reasons Mac users aren't switching to
OS X:
They don't have any reason to. The classic Mac OS works just fine
for them. Why mess with success? They may even have Macs that shipped
with OS X, have tried it, and still see no reason to use it.
They don't know that they can run OS X on their Mac. There's a
common misperception that you can't run a new operating system on old
computers.
A subset of this is people who just run whatever OS came
with their computer - thank goodness we have Software Update to handle
a lot of updates automatically.
Another subset is people who could run OS X on their Macs and
clones, especially accelerated ones, using XPostFacto,
but they believe that it won't work on their old Macs because Apple
doesn't officially support it.
They can't run OS X on their old hardware.
An essential application isn't available in an OS X version,
there's no alternative, and it either doesn't work at all or works very
poorly in classic mode.
In a universe of 25-30 million Mac users, Apple estimated 5 million
OS X users in January and expects 10 million by the end of the
year. At this point let's guess that 7 million Mac users have OS X
installed and use it with some regularity.
Apple has been selling roughly 3 million computers a year at least
since Steve Jobs came on board and killed off the clones. Pretty much
any Mac made in the last 4-5 years is officially supported under
OS X. That's 12-15 million machines, or about half of the
installed base of Macs. Of these, nearly half are using the classic Mac
OS almost exclusively while half are using OS X.
The PCI Power Macs and PCI clones can mostly run OS X. These
were introduced in 1995 and were in production for about three years
before the "supported" models came onto the market. With upgrades and
XPostFacto, a lot of these could be running OS X today. This could
add 4-5 million machines that could run OS X, bringing the set of
X-capable Macs into the 16-20 million range.
These are ballpark figures, but they're all we have to work with.
Apple sells 3 million Macs per year, and all Macs made since 1998 can
run OS X. Several million Macs built before that can potentially
run it. Depending on how you run the numbers, this means about 60-70%
of all Macs in use today could be running Jaguar - and 30-40% will
never be able to do so.
There is attrition over time. Every year that Apple sells 3 million
Macs, 2-3 million probably go out of service. The installed base grows
slowly, it at all, but each year the percentage of Macs in use that can
run OS X increases by 10-12%. Within three years, over 90% of all
Macs in use will be capable of running OS X.
But a lot of them aren't running it today and may never run it. If
Apple grows from 5 million OS X users to 10 million this year, 60%
of that growth comes from people buying new Macs that ship with
OS X. Only two million are switching by installing OS X on
their older hardware.
If this pattern continues, we'll have 15 million OS X users at
the end of 2004. Adding 5 million OS X users per year - both those
buying new Macs and those migrating from the classic Mac OS on old
hardware - we should have 30 million OS X users by Macworld San
Francisco 2008, at which point the G3 and the earliest Macs officially
supported under OS X will be a decade old.
From the acquisition of NeXT to the point where a majority of Mac
users are using OS X will also be about a decade. The time from
the first release version until almost all Macs in use have OS X
is about six years.
Maybe then it will be appropriate to hold a funeral for OS 9 -
except that it will probably still be lurking on OS X 10.7 and
10.8 as the classic environment, much as 68k emulation remained in the
classic Mac OS long after the last 680x0-based Mac was
discontinued.
Accelerated Migration
What can Apple do to accelerate the adoption of OS X so it
doesn't take another 4-5 years before almost every Mac user has adopted
it?
They can look at the reasons Mac users aren't switching and address
them one by one.
They're doing a good job with the iApps. If you want the latest
version of iTunes, you need to have OS X. If you want iPhoto or
iCal, you need to migrate. If you want Safari, OS X is the only OS
that runs it.
That's the carrot approach. Hold out a treat and hope Mac users see
a compelling reason to upgrade their old Mac to OS X.
More than that, Apple needs to make classic Mac users aware that
OS X exists and that it may run on their old hardware. They need
to reach the Mac users like my wife and kids who don't visit Mac
websites and don't read Mac magazines. They need to buy ad impressions
on banner networks that can deliver ads to Mac users running the
classic Mac OS - and they need to target an ad campaign specifically to
the classic Mac user.
Apple needs to offer packages, maybe working with a vendor like
Other
World Computing that's really in touch with the needs of older
Macs. Create OS X complete upgrade bundles for different
computers. The package would include OS X and iLife. Depending on
the older Mac in use, it might include a G3 or G4 upgrade, a larger
hard drive, more RAM, and a better video card. Using a build-to-order
model, buyers could add FireWire, USB, and faster IDE cards to their
PCI Power Macs or PC Card PowerBooks. And XPostFacto on CD for those
who need it.
Instead of selling upgrades piecemeal, Apple and the dealer could
offer a full upgrade solution and customized step-by-step instructions
for turning older Macs into OS X boxes. Local Apple dealers could
work with this program for Mac users who don't feel comfortable working
inside their computers.
But none of that means a thing if they buy OS X, install it,
and find that their fonts break and they can't figure out how to access
the third tray on their printer or find the server on their network.
They won't become OS X users if they can't figure out how to save
files where they want them and then find them easily.
In short, if Apple wants to gain converts, they need to make
OS X as easy, as elegant, as simple, as powerful, as friendly, and
as comfortable as the best OS these people have ever used - the classic
Mac OS.
Anything less will slow the migration.
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and getting a graphical user interface. Fifteen years
ago, Steve Jobs unveiled 
