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You may have seen our review of Mac OS X. You werent seeing things. By my research, the last time we ran a story about Apple on our front page was Aug. 11, 1997. That story detailed how Steve Jobs sold his soul to Bill Gates and Microsoft in an effort to right the foundering ship that Apple had become. Microsoft that summer invested $150 million in Apple and renewed its development and support of Microsoft applications for Mac OS. For two companies that held long-standing animosity toward each other, it was a watershed moment, eerily underscored by the Orwellian Big Brother visuals supplied by Gates as he towered over Jobs.
You booed, and we snickered at Jobs then, but getting back in Microsofts good graces was a shrewd move. And now, ironically enough, Apple is coming out with a new Mac OS X platform that is to previous Mac OSes as Windows 2000 is to Windows 9x: built on a solid foundation.
But whereas Win 2K is Unix-like, Mac OS X is truly Unix, BSD to be exact. And so, despite the ongoing efforts of Linux GNOME and KDE developers, Mac OS X may be the first popular Unix-based desktop for the masses (Linux is not exactly Unix, I understand, but you get my drift).
Its not quite there yet. Mac users can only upgrade now and wont see it preloaded on machines until this summer. Also, as eWeek Labs found, the new operating system will take some getting used to by Mac regulars. Nevertheless, the new Mac OS is a big win not only for Mac users but also for the Unix fandom as well.
Does this mean we will put more Apple news in our pages? Perhaps. Back when we were PC Week, we felt obligated to stick to PC platforms; we had sister publications that covered the Mac world. But as the saying goes, nobody knows what you are running on the Web. A browser client is a browser client. The Mac is not only back, but it looks to have a solid future in the enterprise as well.
