I subscribe to the "Macworld Weekly Newsletter" and at the bottom of each is usually some silly quote from their forums intended to entice you over to register and post yourself. Usually I don't bite, but today's wasn't bad. Here it is:

and the quote of the week: [from here -R]

"I think there's nothing for OS 9 users left at Apple. Let's show Apple we understood the message and switch."

At first I thought this guy meant, "Let's show Apple by getting on the bandwagon, crying huzzah three times, and shelling out $129 plus the price of new hardware for OS X!!!" Luckily he didn't. It's a thread about Apple users' displeasure over the death of OS 9.

I think they have a good point, and this quote (from further down the page) sums it up for me.

quote:"it's not Apple's fault"

Of course it's not. It's me who transformed the Mac OS in a Unix shape with such a clumsy GUI that it needs the latest and the greatest hardware to make it work almost as fast as OS 9 was on three years old machines.

He's bang on the money replying to another post there. I've just reset the boot disk on my 500 MHz iBook to OS 9 this week. I've only had time to surf, AIM, and email on the machine recently anyhow, and OS 9 is so danged much quicker! Add to that that Outlook Express (for Mac) is a much better email client than Mail.app on OS X, that Mozilla 1.0.1 is available for Mac OS 9, and that AIM's still AIM (sure I miss Adium a little), and, well, for those three functions it's an easy choice.

With respect to speed, quite quickly, the poster is right -- OS X on a new machine gives you the performance you get out of OS 9 on three year old hardware. Now that's a big difference! I'd rather use today's computer than one from three years ago. Compare the performce difference from Windows NT to 2k or even XP -- there simply isn't a similar slowdown. Linux, strangely, has actually sped up in certain ways over the last two or three years.

Furthermore, take a look at OS X's "new look". Sure Steve, it's "sexy". Compared to Windows for new PC users, OS X is much easier to figure out. But it's not what all of your past Mac users want or expect. Power users might not have any trouble switching, but some people like the old UI. Spring loaded folders are back, but that hardly fills the chasm. I hate to see Mac OS 9 users become another cult like the forelorn, slowly eroding one that keeps using the Amiga.

I understand that Apple's OS needed an overhaul. I understand that OS X has moved Macintosh into a de facto standard of sorts with Darwin, allowing the OS to leverage all sorts of good software (Adium is a great poster child for that -- it slaps a Cocoa interface over a standard command-line/terminal based *NIX application -- in the end producing a great app). Most of all, I enjoy not having to reboot my machine every 4-5 hours.

But come on Apple, any way you slice it, the performance sucks. And seventeen million or so Mac users around the world are a little upset over it.

While I'm asking for things I can't get, can't we add a right-mouse button to the iBook and Powerbook? Even as an option? As long as the OS supports it (and they both do, 9 and X) with context menus, it's going to drive me crazy that I have to keep hitting control to get to it!