Guys, Have you all heard the new news that Apple is now already moving the ship dates for the new Rhapsody OS and post-System 8 back again? Yep, that's right. The premiere release of Rhapsody (originally planned for distribution late '97 or early '98) has now been moved back to mid to late-summer of '98 (although they now state "it may include some limited blue-box features"). Widespread release will be early-to-mid 1999. The next serious upgrade to System 8 (Tempo, which has now slipped to "fall of '97") will be in late 1998 as well.
I have long held to the impression that if Apple doesn't ship a new, upgraded, preemptively multitasking, symmetric multiprocessing OS by mid to late '97 at the VERY LATEST, they will slide into insolvency. Although I hate to say it, this is without a doubt what is happening. PowerPC processors are great. The MacOS GUI is great. But the fact remains that you can get a Wintel system for MUCH cheaper than even Mac clones (much to my chagrin) and while not a great OS, Win95 is now at least usable (and crashes much less frequently than the mac, even under heavy application loads). Multitasking on the PC is basically flawless from what I've used it for. It's still annoying having to hit "alt-f" and then "s" to save a file instead of "command-s" or to use a similar process to copy text or graphic, but it is ABSOLUTELY CRIPPLING to not be able to run another program while you're using Photoshop or a 3D application because you KNOW there's a 50% chance of crashing your machine and losing 10 minutes while you re-boot and then reload the images, etc, even assuming you saved everything just before you switched over. This is unacceptible. I love the Mac, and I'll probably always own one (since this 7500 is so upgradeable), but I cannot afford to wait years and years for Apple to play catch-up with the rest of the industry, all the while losing potential powerful software because Apple won't stand up for itself and toot it's own horn. What developer would be so INSANELY STUPID to develop for a platform that is quckly and consistently losing marketshare and is heralded by a company that loses money quarter after quarter and its only solution is to reorganize-reorganize-reor- ganize all the while allowing every single speck of press in the universe (including Mac-oriented publications) to absolutely slam them based on erroneous information at every turn?
I mourn Apple's death, but take heart in knowing that the majority of Apple's truly talented engineers now work at MicroSoft (and may be able to transform Windoze into a decent User Experience eventually).
