Business Week: OS X adopters 'mostly impressed'

Early adopters of Mac OS X are “mostly quite impressed,” though their level of “success or frustration depends greatly on what model of Mac it’s installed on,” Charles Haddad writes in his ” Byte of the Apple ” column for Business Week Online .

Interestingly, the column begins by pointing out that Mac OS X “quickly sold out” when it went on sale in Finland. “Now dour Finns are hanging out in Internet newsgroups, sealskin earflap hats in hand, hoping to get a peak. As one Finn with a sense of humor put it online, ‘Hey, brother, can you spare a copy of OS X?'” Haddad said. Meanwhile, some U.S. stores are reporting 60 percent sales of their copies within the first weekend, he added.

But how do users like the next generation operating system? Haddad said that after a week of cruising newsgroups across the Net, he has found a “Mac community about equally divided on OS X.” The divided comments seem to be based mainly on two factors, the columnist said:

The type of machine you’re running. “Beige G3s, Cubes, and early iMacs seem to gag on the thing.”

System tweaking. “Another consistent complaint was sluggish performance. Many concluded that OS X zips along only on the latest G4 Macs. Others discovered you could improve performance on older G3 models by performing something called Clean Install, which clears your system of any previous preferences or software when installing OS X. And its ability to work with devices such as printers and Zip drives seems hit-and-miss.”

However, Haddad noted that as users became more accustomed to Mac OS X, the better they liked it. As they grew more familiar with its new way of doing things, complainers began to praise the power and reliability of the operating system, he added.

“That’s not to say OS X is for everyone,” Haddad said. “There was a general consensus that, for right now, only those with Macs to spare should install it. You’re tempting fate to use OS X on any job-critical Mac or network. That sounds fatalistic, but it shouldn’t. OS X is incredibly strong and stable for the first commercial release of a new operating system, at least based on the hundreds of postings I read last week. Apple is reading these postings, too. And as it always has, the company’s engineers will continue to perfect OS X.”