A pple announced today that starting in 2003, new Macs would not be capable of booting up in Classic Mac OS (OS 9.x). All Macs will instead be allowed to boot up only in Mac OS X. Apple made the announcement at the Apple Expo in Paris, where Steve Jobs delivered the keynote.
The companyis press release includes statements of support from Microsoftis Mac Business Unit, and Adobe Systems. Missing from the announcement was a mention of Quark and its flagship product Xpress, the publishing software on which many Mac-based publishing houses and design firms are based. Quark Xpress is still a Classic Mac OS-only product, something that has kept many of those firms using Classic Mac OS instead of Mac OS X. From Apple:
Apple® today announced that starting in January 2003, all new Mac® models will only boot into Mac® OS X as the start-up operating system, though they will retain the ability to run most Mac OS 9 applications through Appleis bundled "Classic" software. There are nearly 4,000 native applications now available for Mac OS X.
"We expect that 20 percent of our entire installed base will be using Mac OS X by the end of this year, making it the fastest operating system transition in recent history," said Steve Jobs, Appleis CEO. "Now itis time for Apple and our third-party developers to focus all of our resources exclusively on Mac OS X, rather than dividing them between two different operating systems."
All new Macs sold since January 2002 have had Mac OS X factory-set as the default operating system. Over 75 percent of customers using these Macs have elected to keep Mac OS X as their default operating system. Apple estimates that there are over 3 million Mac OS X users today, and expects to reach 5 million Mac OS X users -- or more than 20 percent of the installed base -- by the end of this calendar year.
"Weire happy to see Apple take this next step to drive adoption of Mac OS X," said Kevin Browne, general manager of the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft Corp. "Mac OS X has really come of age with the release of iJaguar,i and we think the combination of OS X v10.2 and Office v. X for Mac provides our customers with the power and compatibility theyire seeking."
"Apple is doing the right thing by making their Mac OS X system transition timeline perfectly clear," said Shantanu Narayen, executive vice president of Worldwide Products at Adobe Systems. "By accelerating Macintosh customer migration to OS X, Apple will make it easier for Adobe and other ISVs to deliver innovative publishing solutions on this robust platform."
Customers will be able to run older Mac OS 9 applications using the "Classic" software that will continue to be bundled with Mac OS X. The newly released Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" operating system has an updated version of Classic which launches twice as fast; awakes from sleep much faster when AppleTalk® is turned on; can share the same desktop and document folders and Internet preferences as Mac OS X; and can access all Mac OS X file systems.
You can find more information on Mac OS X at Appleis Web site.