Commentary--Mac OS X Default OS Not Until April 2002?

According to this San Jose Mercury News report published yesterday, Apple's VP for Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller is quoted as stating that April 2002 is now the target date for Mac OS X to become the default OS on newly shipping Macs. Actually, Phil Schiller is quoted as specifically stating "midnight" on the Jobsian OS X clock rather than April. But the two appear to be equivalent. Since May both Mac OS 9.1/2 and Mac OS X 10.0.3 have been included on the hard drives of new Macs but Mac OS 9.1 (now 9.2 for the newest Power Macs) has been the default OS, i.e. the one that starts up when a new Mac is booted for the first time. In fact, if one did not read the booklet that comes with their Mac, one might not even know Mac OS X is on the drive and how to get it to boot instead of Mac OS 9.x.

The original plan called for Mac OS X to be shipping as the default OS with new Macs today, i.e. summer. Actually Apple began shipping Mac OS X on the drives of new Macs in May, just not as the default OS. The original plan relied on the peak of Mac OS X native application releases to be now. As we saw in the "ten on X" parade portion of Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote, despite Apple's best efforts at cajoling and prodding, the release of many major applications will not occur until late fall or early next year at best. Perhaps an effect of the economic slump in the technology sector is showing up here.

When we originally reviewed Mac OS X we took the position that Apple should not install Mac OS X as the default OS until most if not all of the major applications were Mac OS X native. We still think that is wise. April 2002 does not seem out of line with the application roll out schedule.

[Update] 5 down. 95 to go: Apple's retail web site now lists the Willow Bend (Plano, TX) and Mall of America (Bloomington, MN) Apple stores and provides directions to the locations. The Willow Bend store opened today. The Mall of America store opens August 11th. The slogan refers to market share percentages, not store locations.

[Update] Reader Warning On PageMaker 7: Mike Swope, Senior Graphic Designer at Koch Creative Services, wrote to us warning that Adobe's PageMaker 7 does not translate documents created with earlier versions as advertised by Adobe. Here is his email in full which also comments on difficulties with other recent Adobe releases.

[Follow Up] Several readers wrote that PageMaker has always been only within-platform compatible among versions and cross-platform compatible within versions and that this has not changed for version 7. While true, that is not clear (to say the least) from Adobe's web site and Adobe promotional material about PageMaker 7, hence Mike's warning.

[Update] Cumulus for Mac OS X: Wow! Right after finally getting our TGIF edition up, Canto announced that Cumulus, a major Mac application, now works with Mac OS X.

"Cumulus for Mac OS X Media Asset Management, Workflow and Internet Publishing Solutions for Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server

The following products are available for Mac OS X :

* Cumulus 5 Workgroup Server (Z, D, F, J)
* Cumulus 5 Enterprise Server (Z, D, F, J) (not available online!)
* Cumulus 5 Web Publisher (Z) other languages will follow soon.
* Cumulus 5 Vault (Z) other languages will follow soon.
* Cumulus 5 URL AssetStore (Z) other languages will follow soon.
* As you only require a serial number, the Cumulus 5 Browser
Option is also available for Mac OS X ."