When Mac OS X arrives next month, it probably won’t have every item that users will want. Ken Bereskin, the company’s OS X product manager, told MacCentral that DVD playback won’t be initially available. He also noted that, although X versions of iTunes and iMovie are in the works, they “probably won’t” ship on the March 24 OS CD.
The product manager added that Sherlock, Apple’s system level search engine, would live “permanently” in the OS X Dock. However, the X version of Sherlock will still remain case insensitive for searches because it uses the HFS+ file format — which is case insensitive.
The CD will contain English (in various “flavors”), Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch language versions of the next generation operating system. Other languages, such as Scandinavian, should follow within 60-90 days, Bereskin said during Macworld Tokyo.
A recommended system requirement for OS X is still 128 MB of RAM for optimal performance. Bereskin said this is because OS X has Mac OS 9.1 as the Classic environment. Therefore, it needs all the 9.1 requirements, as well as the needs of the “native” version of the operating system.
Meanwhile, Mac OS 9.1, though released with little fanfare, has been a major success, Bereskin said. There have been over 250,000 downloads of the operating system update since its introduction early last month, he said.