In rebuttal to the recent PowerPage article (“Mac OS 10.2 has no Clothes“) I will come out and say that OS X is far more productive for me than Mac OS 9 ever was. The main reason is superior multi-tasking. I can burn a CD while spooling a print job and checking my email. USB is far less buggy. Many new OS X only applications are very compelling like Watson and iCal. I hardly ever reboot. I no longer keep four separate address lists. There was a learning curve, but it was rather short. I am waiting for just one more application to go native.
Most of the time, I do not need much horsepower to do my work. I think this is true for many users. My 733 G4 Quicksilver is supposed to be a dog in terms of performance with its limited cache, but I wouldn’t know it. OS X is still a pup and hardware performance will continue to improve even as the OS becomes more efficient and faster. I purchased a Macintosh back in 1984 and the hardware could hardly support the graphical user interface. With just a single sided floppy and 128k of memory, more was needed to get beyond just running the OS.
I think those that need the raw speed of OS 9 running a foreground application will find that after another round of hardware introductions and the next substantial update, OS X will become a viable choice. Until then, there is no reason to stop doing what works best.
