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Happy Endings Todd Stauffer
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Apple: Thanks for the Quality
I've spent the last week with my hands in the innards of my computer while CD-ROMs spin out upgrades and experiments. After installing a new SCSI drive in my PowerCenter Pro, (finally) moving from a late beta of OS 8 to the real thing, and dropping the BeOS preview release on its own drive, I realized something: Sometimes I get carried away with the promises of better performance and the siren's song of cheaper prices.
But when I want quality, I always come back to Apple.
Mac Installations
It started when my new 3.2 GB SCSI drive arrived from the mail-order Mac store. Also in the box was extra memory and cache for Donna's Performa 6400, which I installed first. Pop the screws on the back of the Performa that hold its guts in, then grab the handle and slide the motherboard out of the case. Pop in the RAM, snap in the cache SIMM and close it back up. Restart the machine and wait for to hear the squeals of a user who suddenly has a much faster machine.
Next step, install that drive. I had opened the case of the PowerCenter Pro once before, to make sure it really had an open bay, SCSI connector and power connector (I've been burned in the past by mini-tower PCs that didn't offer much expansion). Then, as now, it struck me as a jumbled mess of cables. There's some cool, powerful stuff in that machine, no doubt. But, as design goes, it ain't an Apple.
That proved even more true as I manipulated, strained and swore in an attempt to get the 3.5 inch drive cage out of the machine. The minitower is packed so tightly that it's impossible to move the cage back far enough from the front of the case to extract it in one swift movement. Instead, you're left to turn it about 50 degrees upward using little motions like a car turning around in a small alley. (Spin the wheel four times to the left and move back, turn the wheel four times the other way and inch forward, and so on.)
With the cage extracted I installed the SCSI drive -- only to find that the overhang on the hard drive (which was exactly in-line with the floppy drive that was also installed in the cage) wouldn't allow the cage to slide all the way back in. So, I re-screwed the drive to the cage with it's little hard drive butt hanging out the back.
The SCSI ribbon cable twisted and turned under the cage every time I tried to refit the drives into the case. I'd hold the cable with two fingers on my right hand while I tried to work the cage back into the case. I was banging into the CPU's heat sink on one side and some SIMMs on the other, hoping desperately that I wasn't messing anything up too bad. The ribbon cable for the floppy drive popped out twice, which I had to retrieve and re-install with the pinky and ring fingers on the my non-dominant right hand, since they were the only fingers that could fit in the valley of the components.
Maybe you see what I'm getting at here. Aside from the ease of upgrading the Performa, I've also had luck in the past with my PowerMac 6100AV, which doesn't even have screws. Pop open the plastic equivalent of briefcase latches and slide the case up and off. There you'll see the ribbon cable folded neatly into an exposed bay (if you don't have a CD-ROM drive) and all other expandables are easily at hand.
OS Wars
Finally, I got everything installed correctly (once in place the hard drive spun up like a charm -- I love SCSI) and, after a few hours worth of housecleaning, moving files around and prepping drives, I installed the full version of OS 8 over an older OS 7.6 system folder, which was patiently waiting on one of the drives -- I'd been running the OS 8 beta on another drive for a few months. I can only describe that experience as flawless.
Then came the BeOS. Installed on a drive completely dedicated to it, the BeOS was painless to fire up and install. And, a few glitches were quickly resolved by the recent patch to the Preview Edition. So, I played with Be for a while.
It looks an awful lot like Unix, kids. Not that that's bad, but the demos at Macworld and the few hands-on sessions I've participated in didn't make it feel so much like Unix as mucking around with downloaded archives and creating a filing system for myself did. Again, that's not bad.
For me, what's bad is I'm the most BeOS-incompatible PowerMac owner on the planet. The BeOS can't handle the Adaptec SCSI card in my Mac, it can't handle the Global Village x2 modem I use daily with the Mac or the Personal LaserWriter (QuickDraw) printer that's dangling off the back. Each will need drivers written by their manufacturers, because they're tough-nut problems that the Be team probably won't tackle. Only the drives on the basic SCSI bus work -- fortunately that includes the CD-ROM drive, Zip drive and floppy.
Then I started rooting around for programs. The BeOS site is helpful, although half of the demos I downloaded wouldn't run, offering cryptic responses. (I know my way around gzip and tar. The experience, simply, was often not Mac-like.) Even the special "package" installers wouldn't load for the Be Basics productivity suite demo. I saw a lot of Unix-like tools out there in shareware land, including lots of postscript readers and programmer's text editors.
The BeOS does seem fast, although I had to pick a slower modem, couldn't take advantage of the high-end SCSI card in my system, ran at 256 colors to avoid seriously decreased performance (at millions it slows -- thousands of colors doesn't work yet) and I couldn't print. Oh -- and BeMail never could connect to my mail server, although Adam, a 3rd-party program, could.
Hindsight
I'm not particularly upset with my PowerCenter Pro or with the BeOS -- both are promising, both deliver with value and both will stick around my office for a while. But, I was reminded to be careful when I went comparing start-ups and works-in-progress with Apple. It's too easy to get on Apple's case and ask them why we can't have features in the Mac OS that exist in the BeOS or prices for Macs that are just like the Mac cloners' prices.
Most of the time, Apple is about higher-quality and more robust products. While they sometimes fail, they often succeed. It's that quality that endears them to schools, creatives and entrepreneurs. And, after a week like this one, even someone as jaded as me can applaud Apple's record for quality once again.
Let's remember to encourage this behavior from Apple.