“This week has seen an unbelievable explosion of Mac OS X applications,” Ken Bereskin, Apple’s Mac OS X product manager, told MacCentral in discussing Macworld San Francisco.
Starting this week Apple will make Mac OS X the default operating system on all new Macs. However, all systems will also ship with Mac OS 9.2.2, which can be set as your Mac’s default operating system. Or you can run it in Classic mode within Mac OS X. But with a flood of native applications, Apple is confident that now is the time for most Mac users to move on up to the new operating system.
“We’re getting the Mac developer community behind Mac OS X, as well as Unix and Java developers,” Bereskin said. “We’ve seen 1,000 native products released in the past 90 days. And the number of Mac OS X applications you can expect to see in coming weeks and months is unbelievable.”
He said that the adoption of Mac OS X would be spurred by its new default OS status because newcomers to the Mac platform will be “blown away” by the user experience. Plus, long time Mac users will be pleased with the operating system used in tandem with the latest Apple hardware.
“Mac OS X 10.1 was a great release,” Bereskin said. “We’ve seen a big change in the number of people upgrading since then.”
Mac OS X version 10.1.2 is available through the Apple Store, at Apple’s retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of US $129. The Mac OS X v10.1.2 upgrade package is available for current Mac OS X users through Apple’s Mac OS Up-to-Date program for $19.95, which has been extended until Jan. 31. Mac OS X requires at least 128MB of memory.