Mac OS X Beta was released September 13th. Also announced were two new iBook models, the top end one being a G3/466 with 64 MB RAM and 10 GB HD. Not bad for $1800 and you can upgrade the memory and HD. Makes the new iBook rather competitive versus the PowerBook G3/500. In any case, Mac OS X Beta is only available through Apple, at a price of $32.

The biggest complaints from a vociferous few are that the beta costs money and that it has rather restrictive hardware requirements. As for the second complaint: it's a BETA! Don't expect the final version to require 128 MB RAM, although it will require a lot if you use the Mac OS 9 compatibility module. Likewise the final version will support all USB and Firewire devices and ATA hard drives and most third party products will have new drivers too.

As for charging for the beta, I think it's a good idea. Some people complain that they shouldn't be charging beta testers to test their product. And they don't. Developers get the Beta for free and they have their own beta testers. The public release of Mac OS X Beta is so that adventurous people can try it out. There's a lot of pent up demand for Mac OS X and after yet another delay the Preview release was renamed a Beta release and released now. So this is not a beta for bug testing, it's a beta in that they don't want to have as high expectations as a Preview would have had.

Beta testing is not easy. A good beta tester can tell you the precise cases that cause a bug, other cases that cause the same bug, and related cases that don't cause the bug. Good phone technical support people make good beta testers, because you have the same sort of skills. Narrow down the possible causes to give the developers a better chance of fixing the bug. Random people do not make good beta testers. I hear there have been over 20 000 orders for Mac OS X Beta, think how many raw users would be trying it out and having problems if the Beta were free.

Right now most problems seem to be with the compatibility of Mac OS 9 and older programs. The interface is also not final. It should not be surprising as BSD Unix was not designed to be graphical and easy to use (easy for computer people, and even then that's debatable). Someone actually said that Microsoft has better backwards compatibility than Apple! I can only point to the change to PowerPC computers and to the fact that many old programs written for aged machines like the Mac Plus work just fine on 68040 computers with Mac OS 7 or 8. It's only recently that Apple has decided to stop trying to extend backwards compatibility to truly old machines and software. Microsoft is only now just getting to the point where they have some assurances of backwards compatibility between successive releases of the same OS.

I've already ordered a Beta CD. I doubt I'll install it on my every day PowerBook since I have too many low-level utilities that I need for work. When I get another PowerBook I'll install Mac OS X Beta on the new server. I only need ethernet access and a few server applications, so I probably won't need a Mac OS 9 compatibility environment (I hope). The Beta has a personal web and file server (which at least uses Apache for the web server). DNS and Sendmail will also need to be installed. Hmm, I'll have to learn these things again. The Beta expires in May 2001 and Mac OS X 1.0 has been pushed back again to March or April, so we'll be stuck with the Beta for a few months.

As a final note, it's nice of Apple to release Mac OS X in anything close to a usable form (debatable I know, but I think it'll be usable for me since I'm only going to use it as a light server). Probably they should have just ignored this release and kept working on it without having a thousand people complaining about little problems. Yes, Mac OS X is way behind the original schedule, but software development is hard. Trying to come up with a product that will beat a 20-year competitor in the first try is daunting. Without the expectations of having to beat Mac OS 9, Mac OS X would have been out a long time ago (although it would only have been as easy to use as Mac OS 6 or 7).